


The flight instinct

by newleaves



Series: Deathly Hallows [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Established Relationship, Gen, Hogsmeade, Hogwarts, Holidays, M/M, Not Epilogue Compliant, Number 12 Grimmauld Place, Patronuses, Pensieves, Photography, Professor Harry Potter, Secrets, The Marauder's Map, Unspeakable Draco Malfoy, Wandlore, Warding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:15:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 156,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22883893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newleaves/pseuds/newleaves
Summary: With four parents returned to this side of the veil, Harry is no longer an orphan.  It would be easier if he was the only one who found it difficult.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Harry Potter & James Potter, Harry Potter & Lily Evans Potter, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Remus Lupin & Harry Potter, Sirius Black & Harry Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: Deathly Hallows [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1644898
Comments: 230
Kudos: 350





	1. A memorial, part 1

**Author's Note:**

> When I finished _Notes on a resurrection_ , I was convinced of two things: I wouldn’t write a sequel, and I certainly wouldn’t write a sequel from Harry’s point of view. Here is a sequel written from Harry’s point of view. :D _Notes_ is very much a romance, whereas this is more gen, hence the tags, though there will be no escape from the fact that Harry is obsessed with Draco Malfoy.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who read and left feedback on the last story - I hope that you and new readers like this one too! I don't have a blog presence (though I have just discovered that there is a tumblr user called newleaves who isn't me - don't @ them, I guess); please feel free to share links to this far and wide.
> 
> As of 22/6 I've faffed with the summary again. Basically, it's a domestic drama, where things and other things happen...!

Ten years on from the day that Voldemort died, the weekend of the second of May, 2008, there is a memorial. It takes place on Sunday, the fourth, in the grounds of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the ceremony is to be simple: a series of speeches and readings outside on the lawn, followed by a reception in the great hall.

Among others, this memorial brings Professor Harry Potter to the village of Hogsmeade – to play the hero, just as he’s played since first stepping foot here. He’s not usually to be seen in Hogsmeade at the weekend, but he’s a familiar sight as he lives and teaches at the school during the week.

It’s difficult to say where one can find Hogsmeade, because it refuses to be put on a map. The village is in Scotland, nearly all would agree, and most would say that the scenery commits it to the Highlands, to the West, where the land begins to break and the sun sets in the promise of the ocean.

Beyond that, things get tricky. The village is near Fort William, maybe. Lochaber. Perhaps Inverness, though that would likely take longer from London by train.

If Harry ever wants to know for certain, he’s aware, and he’s never told anyone that it’s a dream of his, he’ll have to find out for himself, by doing something boring like flying with a compass and a map and a stopwatch, fingerless gloves and a flask of hot tea. He’s not sure he’s that sort of person – at least not at the age of twenty-seven, give it time – so he prefers to imagine where Hogsmeade might be from the clues.

The morning of the Hogwarts memorial, Professor Harry Potter arrives early in Hogsmeade, surely uncertain of exactly where he is. He’s not wearing fingerless gloves. It’s been just over a week since he took a walk through the Forest of Dean and he slept poorly this morning, but he’s clothed and he’s shaved and he’s had a shower, which counts him ready to face this excursion. Emerging from the fire at the Three Broomsticks, he nods and grins awkwardly through the usual exchange with Rosmerta, who’s cleaning the beer taps to get them ready for the afternoon.

“Morning, Rosmerta.”

“ _Mor_ ning, Harry.”

Outside the pub, the sun here in Scotland (maybe) is high. The air is fresh, and Harry walks with his hands in the pockets of his robes, which are purple and green, to be traditional. He makes his way down the cobbled road through the centre of the village and then on to Hogwarts Castle, its terminus. He passes through the tall iron gates, which open for him as he arrives.

The elves are already setting up. There’s a group of them, maybe seven, on the lawn in front of Dumbledore’s white tomb, the fissured stone long fused with gold, its square structure a sentry on the bank of the lake. Gathered on the lawn, the elves are retreating from each other, spreading out into a great, wide ring, snapping out magic with their small raised hands.

Between them, chairs appear, slotting into rows facing forwards but arranged to form a circle, cut with an aisle like a stone with a wand, and there’s another shape that’s missing. There are hundreds of chairs, solid and smart, sheathed from head to toe in white velvet with a ribbon of black around their feet against the grass. There’s an emblem in black on the back of each, and Harry recognises this as the Hogwarts crest.

Walking with his hands in his pockets, Harry takes the path to the castle’s main doors, freeing one hand to wave at Hagrid on the way. He’s a distant figure, Hagrid, making his rounds of the paddocks and enclosures which soften the outer edge of the forest, not of Dean. He waves at Harry when he sees him, his arm rising like a flag.

On the steps of Hogwarts Castle, Harry meets the other old Gryffindors on staff, Professors McGonagall and Longbottom, Headmistress and Head of Gryffindor House. They’re caught in conversation on the castle’s threshold. Both are wearing heavy robes in respect of the occasion, and Neville’s are in red and gold. McGonagall’s hat is pinned with a thistle, her robes black wool with black embroidery.

“Morning,” says Neville, his face shadowed by the castle doors. He looks relaxed in advance of this adventure, as usual.

“I trust that you’ve been practising your speech, Professor Potter,” greets McGonagall, steely. She’s joking, Harry thinks.

“Still need to write it,” he tries, not meaning to let himself grin.

The headmistress makes a sound which isn’t quite a snort. “Something coherent,” she recalls, sounding like she belongs here in Scotland, if this is where they are. “Perhaps one or two tasteful jokes. That’s all I asked. That’s all I asked of you _both_ ,” she corrects, turning her gaze on the Hogwarts Professor of Herbology.

“Mine’s set to go,” Neville insists, looking betrayed.

“We are ambassadors for the school and this century’s bright future,” McGonagall goes on, somehow both sarcastic and earnest at the same time.

“Yeah, well, I’m going to go and read mine again,” Harry says, indicating past them, into the dark. “Before we start.”

McGonagall doesn’t quite let him leave. “Madam Granger and Mr Weasley will be arriving ahead?” she double-checks.

“They’ll be here,” Harry says. They aren’t giving speeches, but they’ll be sitting at the front. Unspeakable Hermione Granger and Auror Ronald Weasley, the invitations said, but McGonagall is rarely that formal.

“Is Malfoy coming?” Neville asks, and Harry nearly trips over his shoe.

Why? Well, many things can happen in a week. Professor Harry Potter is capable of achieving more of them than most. He could likely locate Hogsmeade, if he bothered to put in the effort. Unfortunately, losing all inhibition about the romantic entanglement he is currently pursuing with one Unspeakable Draco Malfoy is an entirely different beast from this, middle-aged ramble through the Forest of Dean or none.

“How should I know?” Harry demands from Neville on the threshold of Hogwarts, biting down on his back teeth. They’ve been friends for a long time, which is why Harry knows that he can get away with this.

Neville looks confused, and Harry expects that this is because he intended the question to be innocuous. Reading this and feeling daft, Harry realises that Neville must have already forgiven Malfoy for going off at him in Grimmo’s back garden, which he did only a few weeks ago. Neville has a habit of doing this (“His bark’s worse than his bite, these days,” he always says in the end.).

“Doesn’t he live in your house?” Neville asks now, confused, in an accent which Harry never hears otherwise.

McGonagall is saying nothing, but her eyebrows have risen slightly, when Harry looks at her. She was at the garden party too, if only briefly, to see Harry’s returned parents, Lily and James, and surely Remus Lupin. It’s not clear that she realised Malfoy was there, and if she did she doesn’t seem to have joined any dots.

She’ll have an opinion, Harry thinks, and he’ll care about it, unlike most people’s. He feels rather hot, even in the fresh morning air on the castle’s threshold. He looks back to Neville, rubbing a thumb through one of his eyebrows. “Yeah, er. Yeah, he does,” he manages feebly, shoving his glasses up his face to mask whatever his expression is doing. “But I didn’t ask. He’s always said that he’ll never step foot back in Hogwarts. Hogwarts or – well.”

Harry shuts up at this point, because he’s on the brink of revealing too much. He’s sure that he doesn’t like the feeling.

“Every student in your year was sent an invitation,” says McGonagall neutrally, and this is the first word that Harry’s heard about it. He has a feeling that _sent_ rather than _received_ is a clue.

* * *

They didn’t give up the flat, Harry and Draco, when they returned to number 12, Grimmauld Place from the Forest of Dean. Instead, Harry moved in.

Regulus’s room has never felt like Harry’s, so to leave it was more like checking out of the Broomsticks than giving up a place he called home. The room was redecorated along with the rest of house during the Great Renovation of 1999, only to end up an insipid yellow-pink colour which Harry’s never liked. From the paint card alone he failed to recognise that the colour was the colour of Dudley Dursley’s second bedroom, almost exactly. It turned out differently on the walls from the way that it looked in the tin, and it felt like poetic justice, the first night that Harry lay in bed on his own in the light.

Grimmo’s renovation began with Hermione’s realisation after NEWTs that (“Oh _Harry_ ,”) he had no intention of redecorating even after a year of living in the house. It was a long time coming, this realisation, and Harry had been starting to think that he’d got away with doing nothing. Hermione insisted that she wouldn’t take charge, but relented when Ron said that the only thing _he_ cared about was the spiders (“You can’t _possibly_ leave it like this!”). Harry told Ron that he could manage that (“No!”); Kreacher kept quiet about the fact that Master Harry liked to watch the spiders sometimes, on the longer and darker, wetter afternoons.

The Great Renovation went on until 2001, by which time Harry had worn down Hermione into making all the decisions, thank Merlin. The result was more homely than anything Harry could have conceived, he’s sure of it even now.

Luna painted new flowers in the parlour every time she came to visit, because she didn’t think much of Hermione’s powder blue (“ _Well._ ”). Neville went through the garden and told them what was there (“So you’re saying that _all_ of it’s weeds?”). Harry ended up hating Regulus’s repainted room, missing the tangled undergrowth and anxious that Luna would grow tired of visiting long before she had a chance to finish her mural – but he set Grimmo’s wards because they mattered to him, and he succeeded in never letting on about the magnolia. Eight years later, moving out, he calls that a job well done.

The afternoon when Harry and Draco came home from the Forest of Dean, after a stiff and formal lunch with the rest of the household, who were tiptoeing around things for no reason, Harry bundled his muggle clothes and his shoes into his school trunk, threw the few sets of robes he keeps at Grimmo over one arm and his backpack over his other shoulder. He made ready for his journey and he departed. He levitated the trunk downstairs, where someone had taken the flat’s front door off its hinges and away, leaving only the arch into the hall.

Draco’s sarky mirror remained just inside, cracked and bitter. “Someone looks pleased with himself,” it said as Harry passed it, as though Harry was reaching above his station.

Draco’s flat will forever be Draco’s flat, Harry’s sure of it. Honestly, the flat feels like it was Draco’s flat even before Draco moved in.

The rooms are ostentatiously large, more empty than full, painted a snowy shade of white which was supposed to be stone (“I thought that it would be a nice neutral, but it’s rather pale, isn’t it?”). The furniture belongs to this snowscape, its wood pale ash, and Draco says that he hates it, but Harry doesn’t at all.

The kitchen table is Danish and designer, supposedly: it sits on spindly legs with its spindly chairs in the middle of the dark wooden floor, waiting, poised, alert as though it’s about to skitter away. The sofa is much the same. Draco’s bed has always been an oversized flood of North Sea, battleship grey, and it sits on a Persian rug which is incongruously huge and worn out, mostly dashes of straw-coloured warp threads. The colours blend in with the bedroom floor; they make the boards appear warmer, like a retreat in the Zagros mountains, a place that Harry’s seen on a map. He imagines that it’s worth several hundred thousands of galleons.

What Harry can’t imagine is the place of any of these things in Malfoy Manor, though the rug is sure to have been there on its travels, if only for a century or two. He can imagine them in his own home even less. The first thought is comforting.

“A trunk and a backpack,” Draco established as Harry entered the bedroom, watching and poised, his expression unreadable. “Is this everything you own?” he asked derisively.

Back in Grimmo, they were both pretending that the crying had happened to some other couple, somewhere else. That was healthy, Harry told himself at the time. Or at least for the best.

For the moment, a week ago, Harry shrugged, moving to hang his robes in the half-empty run of wardrobes, dumping his bag inside with them. There were empty drawers inside the wardrobes which Harry would fill eventually, he told himself; the flat had always been intended for two. He let down his trunk by the armchair in the corner, where there sat a stuffed bear once transfigured from a hand towel. The trunk went in snug under the window, and it looked less out of place than it might have done.

“The rest’s up at Hogwarts,” he told Draco over his shoulder. Another wardrobe of robes and his books, anyway. “My toothbrush and stuff’s in the bathroom downstairs.” He shut the wardrobe door. “I’ll get it later.”

He watched Harry do all this, Draco, sharp eyes glinting while his mouth didn’t move. He remained leaned against the wall by his side of the bed, a black spot set against a great square of grey, against white. Always so casual, with one leg cocked; always so posed, his arms crossed behind his back. He looked to Harry like part of an abstract painting, a circle or a line.

Draco’s eyes are pale grey, Harry’s known for a long time. An even stormier grey than the bed, he’s likes to think these days – faceted like marble or flint. He’s lovely in a fragile way, Harry happened to think at this moment, like the sharp glance of light on a cloud. It was sad, how much he always tried to hide it.

“You could have moved in years ago,” Draco remarked without clear intonation, dangerous like ice.

“We both know I practically did,” Harry told him for the joke of it, drawn.

Predatory, Draco revealed his teeth at this moment and they fell back into bed, Harry moving to meet him up against the wall and shutting the door with the flick of his wand.

In his Hogwarts office, which once belonged to Professor Lupin, among others, Harry is met by a dragon of a different kind: bright purple and eager and winsome, squeaking at him with what feels like familiarity and pelting him with soft rainbow-coloured balls of fluff.

“I know, I know, you weren’t expecting me,” Harry tells Puff, shutting the door behind him with a flick of his wand. It makes the wards slot into place; they’re more gentle reminders than threats, here in the castle. As for Puff’s assault, Harry lets the pompoms fall where they will, because they’ll all soon vanish into nothing.

Puff the stuffed dragon wings eagerly around his head, ending up on the bookcase where he tends to perch like a gargoyle. He isn’t sentient, Harry doesn’t believe, and George seems terrified by the idea whenever Harry brings it up (“No, Harry, I have _not_ created life; I’d better not hear you telling Mysteries otherwise.”). Yet it feels as though the dragon is real, a lot of the time. Puff has his moods: he’s cheery nearly always, but he’s grumpy if he hasn’t been fed and he’s strangely shy, on occasion. He eats sugar cubes to sustain the charms which form his existence, once or twice or a few times a day, which is mad but horrendously endearing.

The castle elves find Puff nothing but a bother, they say, but they’ve allotted him his own special sugar bowl, silver engraved with a joke Latin motto on the side. It’s based on the school’s. Harry doesn’t know what it means, but he lets them chortle among themselves.

He’s spoiled, really, Puff, which is why he never controls himself with the pompoms. But it’s difficult to believe that this matters: there’s a flutter of good feeling in Harry’s chest, brought on by his grin at Puff’s greeting.

The feeling fades quickly as Harry puts down his wand on the desk, not lifting his hand, and as he contemplates the fireplace. His speech is sitting waiting for him, rolled up and ready. It’ll be fine, Harry’s certain. He wrote it nearly a month ago and it only needs to read. The wizarding world made their bed with him years back. He could say whatever he liked.

There’s Hermione’s voice in his head, telling him to check it over (“There’s no need to _force_ yourself into winging it, Harry,”), but the fireplace seems more pressing. It’s an important day, and Harry…

Torn, Harry eventually takes up his wand, moves to the hearth and pinches some powder from the small copper pot on top of the mantelpiece. He casts a fire and turns it green, kneeling down on the cool, hard flagstones. “ _Malfoy’s flat,_ ” he says clearly. “ _Third floor, number 12, Grimmauld Place._ ” He takes hold of the grate, its sharp sooty points, and thrusts his head into the flames.

The room is familiar, but empty. Quiet. From his angle in the fire, Harry can see the blue sofa across from him, the white-stone-snow walls. The bookcase which houses everything that Malfoy doesn’t use at work, oddly adolescent in its contents.

Flames that don’t burn flick around Harry’s ears, but even so, he doesn’t think that there’s anything to make out.

“Kreacher,” Harry tries, wondering where everyone is.

With a _crack_ , in an instant, Kreacher is there. “Master Harry’s head called for Kreacher,” he croaks, because he thinks that he’s funny.

His eyes are as insolent as Malfoy’s typically are, and more difficult for Harry to read, these days. They’re large and opal-translucent in colour, looking down on Harry, for once, at this angle, and that seems about right. His little hands are clasped in front of his black pillowcase toga, his locket secure around his neck.

“Is Mr Malfoy here, Kreacher?” Harry asks, trying not to imagine another time and this very fireplace, the way that he always does.

“He has left shortly after Master Harry, Master Harry,” Kreacher tells him, congenial. It seems inevitable that one day Kreacher will lie to him again, and he could be lying now.

Harry makes sure to hear Hermione’s words in his head (“He’s only the product of his influences, Harry.”). But even so, he feels a lick of frustration. Mr Malfoy’s supposed to be _dozing_.

“D’you know where he’s gone?” he asks Kreacher shortly. Please, he thinks, let it not be the Department of Mysteries.

“Mr Malfoy did not inform Kreacher of his business,” Kreacher croaks, sounding sincerely disappointed and familiar.

“Thank you, Kreacher,” Harry tells him, waiting for the elf’s nod before he draws his head back into the office. “Thanks for nothing,” he mutters when he’s alone, because it’s a burn in his chest, his own lack of trust.

There’s another option, Harry supposes, but he knows that the floo won’t be able to help him with it. Mr Ollivander and Luna are coming today, and they won’t be taking seats at the front. They won’t be flooing up, and they certainly won’t be apparating, because Ollivander can’t risk anything like that, not even a portkey, not for years now. The Cruciatus won’t let him suffer it.

The school paid to run the Express yesterday for everyone in a similar position, so Ollivander and likely Luna with him will already be up here in Hogsmeade – but there are a number of places to stay, in and around town. They’re all open for the season. They’re all unplottable too.

Harry contemplates the wand in his hand, holly with a phoenix-feather core, eleven inches.

The spell he wants to use has betrayed him. He hasn’t used it in two months because of that. He hasn’t used it in _years_ because of that. He doesn’t want to use it now.

And yet – there are so many things to think of. He can feel the words on his tongue and the motion in his hand and he knows that to cast the charm will be easy. There’s a moment in the forest, when he was told that he was loved (“Darling, I adore –”). There’s a man lying wide-eyed in a hospital bed, loud and effusive; a woman hugging him close and correcting him with sharp-tongued kindness; another man taking his hands –

But there’s also the harbinger of these things, something stilted and ridiculous (“You must be… You must be _Harry_.”). An arrogant cockerel of a man, lurching at him, his eyes wide and guileless, everything he’s ever lived surely clean and simple and easy.

This spell always belonged to that man.

It doesn’t anymore.

Thinking of a handshake, Harry steps back and flicks his wand. He expects his office in two seconds to be full of a shining magic-white stag, ducking its antlers away from the ceiling and making Puff squeak, rear up and, yes, very likely breathe out another stream of pompoms.

At some point or other, in the last ten years, the stag has left Harry to fend for himself. He’s grown up, maybe; he’s moved on.

The stag’s replacement is a wolf.

A _wolf_ , Harry sees, disappointed.

Thick-coated and solid, sober in its expression, wild and predatory: the white wolf has escaped Harry’s wand to land on the flagstones with menace, and it makes Puff whip clumsily away to his perch.

Harry shuts his eyes and breathes. Looking at the wolf causes him a sharp stab of panic, he knows from long experience. It doesn’t make sense; it never has done. He’s not in love with Lupin, he’s sure of it, and he certainly didn’t fall in love with him while he was dead and Harry was doing his best to help raise his son.

It’s not Malfoy. Harry can’t believe it, not from the way that the patronus makes him feel. It’s certainly not Ginny. Harry doesn’t want it to be himself, so he tries not to let himself think it. Lupin’s at least a friendly face, which takes him back to the beginning again.

Harry thought that the wolf could be Teddy, the first time this happened, but that’s never made sense either. The wolf is fully grown and Teddy is a child, lupine undoubtedly but also a Tonks, maybe even a touch of a Potter, a Malfoy. The name which connects all of these things.

Stalking by Harry’s desk and circling, the wolf is keeping low to the office’s flagstones, never holding its head high. It would be willing to send a message, Harry thinks – to check with Luna that Malfoy’s with her and Ollivander and that he’ll be safe, here in this castle. Protected. At least on this day.

But Harry can’t bear to let the wolf speak with his voice. Not this _thing_. It’s not ugly by any means; it’s just not –

Breathing firmly, Harry ignores the predator prowling with an eye to the door, sitting down at his desk and pulling his speech towards him, forcing himself to untie the ribbon. He concentrates on the fibres of the parchment, the shade of the ink and the shape of the letters, ignoring the wolf until it goes away.

* * *

It didn’t feel odd to sleep with Draco, the night after the Forest of Dean. Not after another stiff meal and a few stiffer drinks – a confab with Ron and Hermione. Draco deigned to sit on the arm of the Chesterfield sofa, the humming, urgent nerves of him not far from Harry’s shoulder, and it was a question to which Harry had the answer.

The next morning, Harry woke up to a sharp set of knocks on the door, and this felt very odd indeed.

Beside him, Draco shot immediately upright, alert, his back straight and his eyes wide with unseeing fear.

“It’s all right,” Harry told him instinctively, taking hold of his wrist. He felt certain that the bones would break, still half asleep, so he moved to take hold of Draco’s thumb instead.

Beside him, Draco let out a shuddering breath, and Harry was sure that it would pull him apart.

“Who’s that?” Harry shouted at the door, tightening his grip.

 _“Take a guess,”_ came Sirius’s voice dryly, and Harry blinked to remember that he wasn’t dreaming and the man wasn’t dead, or something like that. He’d been found somewhere and in time.

Right then, he was knocking on the door. Again. _Sirius._

 _“Bloody hell; it’s me,”_ he was insisting, impatient, absurd. _“Get up; we’re going out. Honeymoon’s over.”_

This made Harry flush.

 _Honeymoon?_ Draco mouthed, making a face. His eyes were wild and wide, for a few moments more.

Shrugging, not commenting on this, Harry turned back to face the door, his grip returning to Draco’s fragile wrist. “Hardly a honeymoon if we’re home, is it?” he told his godfather, not intending to make this his argument. “We’re asleep,” he tried to cover, quickly, though he rather liked the idea… “Go away,” he finally located.

 _“You’re taking me to breakfast,”_ said Sirius.

Draco looked at Harry as if to say that this was his fault, no question. He, Draco Malfoy Esquire, would be taking _no one_ to breakfast, and if _anyone_ came through the bedroom door there would be all hell to pay, from Harry’s flesh.

He was almost looking like himself again, woken up, though Harry imagined that he would feel like cold sweat if he clambered on top of him, for fun.

“You’re the one who brought him back,” Harry pointed out instead, to wind him up.

“He brought himself back,” Draco snapped, the flash of his eyes sharp and dark.

It made Harry grin.

The room was a soft and sleepy grey around them, the light outside almost entirely cut by the curtains. Harry had no idea what time it was, but snapping plainly settled Draco into his skin, which made it the morning. He revealed himself to be nothing but exhausted and grumpy, out of focus in his rumpled black t-shirt and his fluffy, streaky hair, his skin clean and pale with sleep. To Harry, he looked like nothing but pure chaos. Feeling. Energy, instinct, light. Fear and the night made him hide it all away; it made him freeze; it made him say horrible things. It was nice, this fearless version of him.

Another knock. Ruddy hell, Harry thought.

“Yeah; all right!” he found himself yelling, because he’d been enjoying the romance of his thoughts. “Merlin,” he added, loud enough to be heard.

With the sound of something like a snort, finally, there was Sirius stomping away in his boots. _“Half an hour!”_ he shouted as goodbye.

Harry snorted because it was ridiculous.

"He is a fucking dog,” Draco swore, looking like something ethereal.

“Whereas _you_ ,” Harry told him, bouncing on the mattress to swing over Draco’s knees – because, well, it takes Harry ten minutes to get ready at most, and he doesn’t much care about sweat. “What are you?” he asked, looking into the facets of Draco’s eyes.

They were speculative and cold. “What would you like me to be?” Draco asked, sounding like a dream.

It made Harry grin, and he snogged him sniggering for twenty-three minutes exactly, he guessed, one hand taking a tight grip on the headboard, the other Draco’s spine and his neck and his feathery hair.

* * *

At half past nine in the morning, on Sunday the fourth of May, an hour before the memorial service is to begin, Harry’s thoughts are interrupted by a leaping silver hare, pouncing to his desk.

 _“Hello Harry,”_ says the hare in Luna’s voice. It twitches its nose. _“Draco would like you to know that he’s attending the memorial today. He doesn’t know where his invitation went, so he’s coming as Mr Ollivander’s guest. We might not see you,”_ Luna carries on easily, warning him. _“I imagine that this is going to be an important day for many people, because they’ll have a chance to shake your hand.”_

Message delivered, the hare leaps away.

Once upon a time, Luna helped Harry disappear. They’ve both grown up long since, or something like that.

He can still see Luna’s face when he caught her and Liz in the kitchen at one of Ginny’s parties. It must have been in the early days of their relationship – 2000, 2001, 2002. Startled, like a rabbit looking at a wolf, Luna was sitting on the sideboard, flushed like a sexual being, out of character, her hair full of volume, her lips muddied pink.

Liz laughed and offered him a beer. They’d been talking earlier in the evening, likely because she’s always been Harry’s type, if it can be said that he has one: sporty and pretty and outspoken. Not at all interested in him, which made her rare and exciting after the war.

In the Harpy House’s kitchen, whenever it was, Harry took the beer and left with what he hopes to have been a jaunty wave. It’s the longest exchange he and Luna have ever had about his sexuality.

In Harry’s office, now, his speech is lying under his hands, unrolled on the desk, and none of the words are going in. It’s ten minutes long, by Harry’s estimation, and there’s half an hour before he’s due to head outside. That’s more than enough time to practise once through and reflect.

He spends fifteen minutes idly contemplating what he and Neville might do with the duelling club, for the two final sessions before end-of-year exams. And then he heads outside early, the rolled up scroll in his hand.

“Wish me luck,” he tells Puff, who wheezes at him, his eyes round glass.

* * *

In the hour or so that has passed since Harry’s arrival, a crowd has gathered on the lawn in front of the lake. There are representatives from the press, whom Harry avoids. There’s Flitwick, still going strong, and Sprout, now retired, chatting away with the odd, quiet man who teaches Potions, Peleus Thompson, who isn’t head of Slytherin because once upon a time he was in Hufflepuff. He looks after the badgers instead, and under his watch the dungeons forever smell like misty autumn mornings, bonfire smoke and damp leaves.

There’s Neville too, again, over by the platform which the elves have constructed, black and white to match the chairs, feature and field reversed. He’s chatting easily with Ron and Hermione and Ginny, her fiancé Matías, Harry guesses, who doesn’t look at all out of place. Matías is surely going to be more than nice enough, though this is the first time Harry’s met him. He has dark features, and Harry supposes that it could even be flattering, that this is what Ginny likes. He’s handsome: taller than Harry by a couple of inches and broader, his face nonetheless more precise-looking, the shadow of a beard around his jaw. He’s laughing at something Ginny’s saying, like they all are. His laugh is a loud and easy sound, uncompromised, much more like that of a stag than a wolf.

The five of them make a group which Harry’s clearly supposed to join, so he does.

“Harry!” they all say, in various tones of voice.

“Oh, hey there,” says Matías, holding out his hand. “Great to meet you.” His expression says that this isn’t a lie. To Harry his accent is slick and American. “Matías Núñez; I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Likewise,” Harry agrees, shaking his hand. He doesn’t bother to offer his own name, because everyone’s just said it and to repeat it would sound egotistical. “Congratulations on the league,” he adds, sounding awkward and British. The Falmouth Falcons won this year, he’s heard somewhere, and Ginny’s fiancé plays for the team.

“Ugh,” says Ginny nonetheless, making a face and sticking out her tongue, because Puds U were robbed, everyone’s said. She’s buzzing with energy, here under the bright blue sky; her expressions always make Harry grin. “No quidditch chat,” she insists.

“You’d be saying that if things were reversed, eh, Gin?” Ron jokes. Hermione nudges him in the side, not saying anything.

“Mm,” replies Ginny, refusing to swallow the bait. She turns to Harry, her ponytail swinging behind her. The morning sun makes her red hair gleam gold, a match for Neville’s robes. Her own are yellow and magenta-acid pink, as though Godric’s off to a rave. “I’ve been saying that we should all ditch for George’s. Nev agrees –”

“That’s not _quite_ what I said…”

“This is going to be boring as _fark_ ,” Ginny finishes, drawing out the sound like a wizard from the Wizengamot. “Have you two even come up with anything good?”

Harry can feel the fat roll of parchment in his hand. He taps it against his leg, to remember where he is. Ginny’s nervous, he thinks; he can see it in the way that she moves. She’s never worked in an office; she’s never taught schoolkids; she’s never had to learn to contain it.

“What’s George’s?” Harry asks, looking to Ron.

“He didn’t feel like all this,” Ron says straightforwardly.

He’s holding Hermione’s hand, Harry notices, the gesture half hidden between them. Hermione looks rather drawn and serious, to Harry’s eyes, as though she doesn’t want to speak until the whole thing’s over, no matter that she has no official speaking to do at all. Her brown eyes meet Harry’s, and they’re very loud.

An awkward smile crosses Ron’s face like an apology, and Harry knows that he’s seen him see. “He thought that it’d be, you know, too serious. Nothing but optics,” Ron says about George, using a word that Harry doesn’t know. He can guess what it means. “He knew that _we’d_ have to be here,” he continues, gesturing to the group of them, sort of including Matías as well, “but he and Angelina thought that they’d put on a bash at the shop. Your mum and dad have gone,” he adds, making Harry startle and blink, parchment rough in his hand.

“Harry’s mum and dad have come back from the dead,” Ginny tells Matías, pressing an arm and a hand to his chest, looking up. “It’s a secret for now. Don’t tell anyone.” She wags a finger at him, joking. “I want to meet them,” she tells Harry, while Matías glowers with mock-solemnity, surely used to keeping his private life private. “George says they’re fun.”

Neville speaks before Harry can pick up on this, his voice deep and good-humoured and not in fact taking the piss. “They’re both just like Harry,” he says. “His dad’s a right laugh.”

Harry stares at him. “You what?” he manages now.

There’s the sound of Ron’s cackle, out of place where they are. “You’ve put your foot in it there, mate,” he says.

“Oh,” reflects Neville, not looking repentant. Cheeky git. “Sorry, Haz.”

“Don’t call me _Haz_ ,” Harry tells him, and Ginny practically screams with laughter, because they’ve both been running this gag for years. The name’s something that two Hufflepuffs once called him. There’s a gleam in Neville’s eyes, because he always lights up around Ginny. He’s never said anything about it and Harry’s never asked; the others don’t often see him without her.

“ _It’s Hazza Jazza Potter, king of the club,_ ” Ginny recites, thankfully under her breath. Her brown eyes meet his, daring.

“Really?” Harry asks her, containing himself. “Do we have to?”

“ _He’ll either break your face, or he’ll give you a snog,_ ” the rhyme goes on. Ginny’s bopping a little to the beat, her tone lilting into the tune. “ _Which one? This one – that’s who he is._ ” There are gestures, which make Matías titter, in a manly way. “ _Best hope he leads with his mouth, or else he’ll lead with his –_ ”

“Give it a rest,” Ron interrupts, suddenly looking annoyed. Harry isn’t sure what his own face is doing. It feels as though it’s burning bright red. “That thing wasn’t funny ten years ago, and it’s not funny now.”

“On the contrary, my dear brother,” says Ginny, hands on her hips as her fiery hair swings in an arc. “It’s always been funny, because it was once very true.”

“I think it’s a good tune,” says Neville, perfectly affable.

“ _Harry_ knows I’m joking,” Ginny tells Ron, and she smacks an absent kiss to her fingers to blow at Harry’s face.

“Did you find out if Malfoy’s coming?” Neville asks Harry, as though to change the subject.

Harry opens his mouth to –

“Malfoy’s this loser who lives in their house,” Ginny tells Matías, and it’s all nerves. She’s nervous. She has a habit of being loud when she’s nervous, likely because she was once very shy. And yet – “You’ll meet him at some point. He was on the other side; these days he’s like a bad omen. Miserable.”

Harry has the urge to snap. He doesn’t know what he’s more annoyed about: the way that Ginny’s talking about Malfoy or the daft way that she’s narrating their conversation for her fiancé, who’s surely capable of picking up these things on his own. That stupid bloody song that won’t die.

He bites down on his teeth, and they’re all of them silent.

“That’s unfair, Ginny,” Hermione comes out with, her voice weak, but startling. “Malfoy’s our friend.” She elbows Harry in the side.

Elbowed, Harry’s not sure what Hermione expects of him. “What?”

She meets his eyes, and her own are louder than before, pointedly widened.

Ginny’s looking at Harry too. Her eyes are sharp. “Sorry, Hermione,” she’s saying dangerously. “But he’s no friend of mine.”

“He helps out Auntie Dromeda with Teddy,” Harry tells her, because this is how he’s been explaining Malfoy’s presence for years. It’s the sort of thing he thinks might persuade her. In the least, it’s something that she can’t have an answer to. “Teddy thinks that he’s amazing.”

Hermione sighs. Harry doesn’t look at her.

“It’s true, Gin,” Neville points out. “I’ve heard it now from the horse’s mouth.”

He’s glancing at Harry, Neville, nervousness in his expression. Harry imagines that he’s thinking about the time when Harry shoved him backwards over a wall – years ago – for reasons that Harry doesn’t remember. Neville was telling him to do something like calm down. The wall was only two feet high and he landed on soft grass; he’s taller and larger than Harry and only fell because they’d been out all night drinking – but still.

Just like that night, as though she never intends to forget it, Ginny doesn’t give Harry a warning. She asks Neville sweetly, “Was this before or after Malfoy threw a table at you?”

“It was only a chair,” Neville allows, looking towards Dumbledore’s white tomb, “and he didn’t really throw it… I was being insensitive.”

He was being too insightful, and that’s always been Neville’s problem.

“What were you being insensitive about?” Ginny asks, with a strong streak of chivalry. She already knows, Harry’s certain, and it fills him with dread.

It’s not that he doesn’t _want_ to come out about Malfoy, whatever that would mean. This just – isn’t the right moment. It’s an important day.

Neville’s looking at Ginny until he isn’t, when he’s looking at Harry. He looks torn between them. He looks like he belongs here, wearing red and gold under the bright blue sky, no matter the expression on his face.

“This must be painfully boring for you,” Ron interrupts laconically, leaning towards Matías. The man laughs as if to say _yes_ , or else that he has no idea what’s going on.

And then they’re all laughing – a bit – because _ha ha_ , this is funny.

“You’ll have to make up your own mind on Malfoy,” Ron explains when they’ve calmed down, even as Harry finds himself rolling his eyes. “He can be difficult, yeah? But us three all like him. Have done for years now.”

Neville chips in, “I don’t mind him, most of the time.”

“We’re all different people, aren’t we?” Ron agrees.

Harry thinks about the wolf.

Then he realises abruptly that he hasn’t said _anything_ about his own thoughts on Malfoy, and Ginny’s fiancé might think – “Yeah,” he just about manages, when Matías glances at him, feeling panicked. “He’s – different.” He’s not different at all. “He’s all right.” He’s the best thing Harry’s ever encountered, and it took fifteen years to take it in. “He’s coming with Luna,” Harry remembers to tell Neville, who nods, clearly chastened.

Ginny makes a noise of frustration.

In a second which Harry hopes that no one will notice, he glances at Ron. Ron looks concerned – unimpressed. He clearly promises to watch out for any negative attention from elsewhere, later, given that Harry will likely be occupied.

Bouncing on her toes, here on the Hogwarts lawn, Ginny looks like she wants to climb out of her skin. “What are we having at this reception?” she finds another avenue of attack. “Is it sandwiches?” she demands from Harry, as though it’ll be his fault if it is.

She can be gentle, Ginny, Harry knows, and she can be abrasive, the way she’s being now. He has the urge to tell her to wind her neck in. He finds it charming, knowing where he stands. He has the urge –

“I dunno,” he promises instead, forcing himself to let it go.

* * *

“What’s this about?” Harry asked, when he and Sirius found themselves in one of the local muggle coffee shops, a week before the second of May. It was a busy Friday morning in central London, the colours of the place an un-homely corporate blue and the feel of it all printed type.

There are coffee shops like this – _exactly_ like this – up and down the country. They’re muggle; we know what they look like, whether blue or green or red or brown. Harry’s been to plenty of them, every one of them anonymous. They’re a necessary evil, he thinks, for the life that he lives. But he knows that he doesn’t belong, and it always puts him off.

Sirius seemed in his element, that day. He’d a cappuccino and an espresso in front of him, a muffin and a freshly toasted panini (“ _Panino,_ ” Harry has heard Draco say, and Hermione agree, though he can never remember why; he’s not sure what’s correct.). There were meatballs inside of this sandwich, and Sirius bit into the thing with glee, cheese stringing into the stubble he hadn’t shaved before he ate it up, not really like a dog.

“Is that all you’re having?” he asked, not answering Harry’s question, looking down at the expensive cup of tea which Harry had ordered for something familiar. “You should try one of these,” he encouraged, nodding his head towards his tiny espresso cup and then shooting it in one swallow.

“I know what an espresso is,” Harry pointed out. “I don’t like the taste of coffee.”

Sirius made a face, his dark grey eyes alight as he grinned around his eyeteeth. “Hark at you,” he said, sounding exactly like Harry’s mother. “In my day it was cool to drink stuff like this.” He was taking up his cappuccino by this point. “Mm,” he said appreciatively, his nostrils flared as he breathed in the smell of the froth.

“I’m not very cool,” Harry pointed out. He never has been; he never will be. “And what are you talking about?” he asked. “Everyone was going to coffee shops in the nineties.”

“I must have missed that,” said Sirius darkly. To be fair, Harry was only going by what he’d heard. “I’m talking about 1979,” Sirius clarified.

“Oh,” Harry said.

For some reason, this made Sirius laugh. Harry wasn’t sure that he remembered it, whatever manic energy had caught hold of his godfather this morning. It caused him a spike of anxiety. The man tipped back on his chair legs, because he could, Harry imagined, and Harry thought that it was a good thing he looked thirty, because he certainly wasn’t acting fifty years old.

Taking another bite of his sandwich, Sirius returned the chair to solid ground, raising his eyebrows.

“I don’t know where to start,” he admitted, munching.

“Start on what?” Harry asked, drinking a mouthful of tea, which had been served a touch too cold.

Sirius rolled his eyes. “Did we or did we not only yesterday have a big, blow-up row?” He pointed this out as though it was something to acknowledge. “About –” He wasn’t able to say it.

Harry shrugged, watching Sirius’s gaze fall to the right. He’d had ten years to come to terms with the fact of his death. “So what? We had a row; the row ended; it’s done.”

“You are worse than your father,” Sirius said under his breath, which put Harry’s back up because he wasn't his father, he was a wolf.

“How’s that?” he asked shortly.

Rolling his eyes, Sirius didn’t reply. He moved on quickly. “I’m not sitting through a single meal more where we do nothing but smile at each other and request the decanter.” He seemed to think that he was clearing the air. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. There’s no need to freeze us out.” And then he came out with something from nowhere. “Did you really accuse Remus once upon a time of trying to _step into my shoes_ by acting like he cared about you?”

“What?” Harry asked him, off-balance. He didn’t remember saying anything like this.

Peering at him, Sirius frowned, unreadable. Then he looked away. “Doesn’t matter,” he lied briskly. “I’ve been catching up,” he went on, glancing at the table next to theirs before looking down at their own and deciding on another bite of his sandwich. “Can’t say that I expected you to start appreciating the, ah, rougher of the sexes,” he found his next point, awfully, munching as though he hadn’t eaten properly in weeks. “Not bad, is it, the male form?” He offered this with a wicked quirk of his eyebrows, half swallowing his words.

At the look on Harry’s face, he hooted, covering his mouth with his fist.

“Our secrets are no more, Harry,” he said after swallowing, mock-earnestly. “We’re going to have to embrace it.”

Yeah, Harry thought. And some of them would be embracing Harry’s former Defence against the Dark Arts teacher (“Does it bother you?”).

Despite himself, and despite the fact that this was _Sirius_ , back from the dead, Harry felt anger bubble up in his chest. “Why don’t you mind your own business?” he suggested before he could help himself. They’d been putting him back into bad habits, these so-called parents.

It didn’t help that Harry’s tone seemed to be water off a duck’s back. “You’ve been with that Malfoy for, what, five years now?” Sirius accused. “Don’t you think that it’s about time –”

“Where the hell d’you get five years from?” Harry demanded, because he didn’t count it as anything like that at all.

Even being shouted at, Sirius looked pleased with himself. “I have my ways,” he said with an irritating aura of mystery.

“Well, _no_ ,” Harry told him, putting down his cup and wiping his hand on his jeans because he’d successfully spilled his tea. His eyes followed the waiter, passing by their table with two more white plates bearing cheesy sandwiches, waiting until he’d moved away. He thought about calm things, forests and streams. Exercise. “It was _four_ years ago that I saw him again –”

This got a laugh. A proper one this time, a bark which came with a grin.

“We were never together,” Harry said bluntly, staring Sirius down. “Except for a week, when I snogged someone else. You can fill in the blanks, I’m sure.” He said this snidely, daring Sirius to judge him. He didn’t know why he was being so honest. “I don’t do relationships.” This is how he’s always put it.

“What’s the move downstairs, then?” Sirius asked lightly, as though he was confused, not put off at all, which was bizarre.

“It’s…” Harry shrugged, thinking of walking barely clothed by a stream and pointing out a frog, like a loser. He didn’t feel calm; it wasn’t working. “It’s a change in circumstance,” he came up with.

Watching Harry carefully, Sirius appeared to make a decision, there in the coffee shop. He sighed, not reacting at all the way that he should have done. “You poor child,” he said, his gaze piercing. He picked up his muffin and set it down by Harry’s cup of tea. “Eat this and stop worrying so much,” he commanded, as though Harry was breaking his heart. His eyes were full of sympathy. “It’s going to be fine.”

Ants crawled in Harry’s stomach. They multiplied, into two and into four and into eight. It had always been the same with Sirius: this feeling of something that Harry had never had; this feeling of something parental. It was nothing that he’d ever felt with Lupin, he was sure of it, and his dad… His mum never called him by his name.

A sting that was sharp cut into Harry’s eyes, there with Sirius, and there were things that he found himself wanting to say. He fought them back, but he wasn’t sure why, in that moment.

“We’ll talk about something else.” This statement was solid and warm, and Sirius’s eyes were dark grey. “What is it you’re doing for fun in the two-thousands?”

“Nothing, really,” Harry said, looking at the muffin on the table, reaching to press his fingers to the paper. Shagging Malfoy was most of the answer, though there’d been a sixteen-month lull on that until yesterday.

“ _Harry,_ ” said Sirius wearily, seizing hold of his wrist.

It took Harry by surprise. He looked up and there was a flash from somewhere, maybe outside the shop, a warning signal, maybe something else.

At Hogwarts, as Harry steps up to the platform in front of Dumbledore’s tomb, there are several more bright flashes of light, and Harry knows exactly what they are. There are more than there were for Neville, maybe, though this is likely only Harry’s perspective, the feeling of being under scrutiny. Knowing what they all want to see.

He doesn’t know why McGonagall insisted on him going at the end. His won’t be the last words of the morning, because those will be the headmistress’s, thanking everyone for coming and inviting them into the castle – but it’s made him feel separate from everyone’s grief, sitting and waiting. He’s not been able to empathise or really remember, because the fact is that he never fought in the Battle of Hogwarts. He was busy flying Malfoy out of the fire, all the rest of it.

Neville went at the start, before Dennis Creevey and the other siblings shared their few words (“This memorial will be for the young,” McGonagall said, in a planning meeting months ago. “Hogwarts is a school.”). Ginny’s spoken for Fred, and Harry knows he should have realised that this is the reason she’s here, instead of on tour or skipping the day to be with George. Percy and Audrey and Molly and Arthur are somewhere in the crowd, to listen.

She cried, Ginny, the tears streaking down her face. Her voice broke at the end of the poem she was reading, and she sobbed harshly into her hand. On Monday there’ll be pictures of her sorrow, Harry imagines, across quidditch sections and tabloids throughout Europe, at least, and maybe throughout the whole world.

Behind the lectern on the wooden boards of the wooden stage, valanced black, Harry points his holly wand at his throat and says the spell. “ _Sonorus_.” He clears his throat, which now itches. “Today we find ourselves in front of the tomb of Albus Dumbledore,” he begins, his eyes dry as he looks down at his own handwriting. “I like to think that he’ll be watching over us, even now. He must be one of Hogwarts’ most lauded headmasters.” Harry reads on, moving into eulogy, “Sorted into Gryffindor in 1892, he took up the position of Professor of Transfiguration after cutting his teeth on Defence against the Dark Arts, my own subject…”

This takes a few minutes. There’s plenty to cover, so Harry moves briskly without too many dates. This is also because he didn’t bother to check any of the details. Glancing up and ad-libbing some of the sentences, cameras flash at him. They flash and they flash and they flash. Harry reads.

“But there is another Hogwarts headmaster about whom I would like to speak today.” Harry pauses, and faces look at him over their cameras. “His name was Severus Snape.” A few murmurs. “He was born in Cokeworth, near Birmingham, to a man named Tobias and his mother, born Eileen Prince, in the year of 1960. In 1971, he came to Hogwarts and was sorted into Slytherin…”

This goes on for a little while too, though Harry raises his head more often, as though to dare an interruption. Everyone listens politely. The silence is quiet enough that Harry can hear the scratching of journalists working their quills – he can see them working, there at the side. They weren’t as bothered for Dumbledore, who’s old news.

“Our relationship was defined by all the times I answered back…”

He gets the timing right. Everyone laughs with a soft little chortle. Harry looks up, forcing a grin, and there are flashes of light to catch him being insincere.

Eventually Harry rounds to a conclusion: “These two headmasters of Hogwarts taught me that bravery comes in many forms, and it is not the exclusive purview of Gryffindor House. The war was always intended to divide us, not least into Gryffindor on one side and Slytherin on the other, Ravenclaw in the middle and Hufflepuff burying the dead – these houses telling us our duties, rather than acting as homes. But our allegiances are not fixed at the age of eleven. The roles we play as children do not define us, in the same way that war never will.

“Let us look to the next ten years with hope and with unity,” he finishes, sounding like the Sorting Hat, by intention, another old scion of Gryffindor who’s neutral these days. “These things are the essence of peace. They arise in times of peace and they create it; let them be ours.”

And here he stops talking. He breaks the spell on his throat and steps down from the platform, its black-and-white velvet covering. Applause trickles and swells to thunder in his ears and instinct brings him back to his seat, where Hermione springs up and pulls him into a hug. He pulls her close and hides in her hair while Ron pats him roughly on the back.

“Oh Harry,” Hermione chides as McGonagall takes to the platform. She’s crying, Hermione; her eyes are red. One of her hands is resting on Ron’s arm. “I’ve never heard such a load of old cobblers.”

“Since when are you a fan of Snape?” Ron asks him from the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t there, a month ago, when Harry kicked off about this.

Harry laughs, and the force of it makes his eyes sting. “Don’t you think that he’s a hero?” he asks Ron back. “I think that he’s a hero. All that stuff makes him a hero. We should’ve realised it, back in the day.”

Frowning, Ron’s expression seems to suggest that Harry’s position is obviously different from this. “You hate it when people keep secrets,” he says.

“That’s not true,” Harry points out. Or – “I like it when things are revealed.”

He’s thinking of Draco, in honesty. Draco’s the exception to many, many rules.

“We can talk about this later,” Hermione interrupts, shushing them and dragging on their arms to make them sit down. “But you do hate secrets, Harry,” she whispers as McGonagall rounds things up, to get the last word. “You hate being played for a fool. And I notice that you didn’t mention the weird thing he made you do with your eyes.”

Harry shrugs, even so. McGonagall doesn’t take long, and then people are moving in their seats to stand up, making noise but not chatting. Cameras flash and everyone is in their best robes. “Something coherent with a couple of jokes,” he reports to Hermione, as they stand up too. “That’s what I was asked for. I think I did a good Harry Potter, don’t you?”


	2. A memorial, part 2

There was a headline, the last Saturday in April, a week before the Hogwarts memorial. It wasn’t on the front page. Harry didn’t know about it, first thing in the morning, because he doesn’t take the paper.

While subscribing witches and wizards across the breadth of the country sank their teeth into the juicy piece of gossip headed by this headline, Harry found himself in bed before breakfast, clothed and sitting with his feet to his chest, watching Draco choose between near-identical sets of black robes. Draco’s hair was damp, combed and flat, which made his head look like a skull. He’d be back in the bathroom in a minute to faff it all into shape, at which point he’d only look sharp.

“It’s going to come out, isn’t it?” Harry was saying about Sirius, about his parents, about Lupin, because this was what he was thinking about. He’d dreamed again of Sirius dying, the night before, though he hadn’t made a sound as he’d woken. “It’ll be all over the news and everyone will be going _on_ and _on_ …”

“I wasn’t aware that you were still selling papers,” Draco drawled, slipping a set of robes off its hanger. It was a complicated business with lots of shifting movements, mirrored in the grand mirror on the wall, until the outer robe ended up on the hanger alone, back in the wardrobe for a moment as the main robe went over Draco’s head. It immediately turned his colouring stark white and harsh, the collar high under his chin.

“It goes in cycles,” Harry explained. “Every time I think they’ve given up, it gets dragged out again.”

It was both beautiful and sad, somehow, Harry thought, the way that Draco transformed himself. It got to him that morning, because he was watching, and he wasn’t sure he’d seen it in the moment before.

“And this is my mum and _dad…_ If it had been…” Harry didn’t know how he wanted to finish this sentence.

“If it had been our former headmaster –?” Draco suggested, prompting. He was doing up his front fastenings, glancing at Harry with his eyebrows raised.

Harry shook his head. “That would’ve been the same.”

“However so?” Draco asked, looking perplexed.

“It doesn’t matter,” Harry dismissed, swallowing and looking away, at the threads of the rug. “What’re you getting all smart for?” he came up with, grinning, which was easy. “Are you coming with me to Teddy’s?” he asked, because it was Saturday. “Sirius is coming. Auntie Dromeda told me that if he came back… Moony’s dithering.” Harry wasn’t impressed by this, but he didn’t plan on saying anything – it wasn’t as though he could tell Lupin how to father his own son. “I imagine that we’ll be on the Xbox.”

“I could do,” Draco suggested, drawing it out. He was retrieving his outer robe now. And he loved the Xbox; it was lies when he said that he hated it. “Although – you realise that Aunt Andromeda will see straight through any act of indifference.”

“Who says that I’ll be acting indifferent?” Harry asked him, though he wasn’t sure that he could promise anything.

Draco’s eyes flashed, and it made Harry grin.

 _“HARRY!”_ there then came a call from outside the door. It was Harry’s dad; it should have ruined the mood. _“MALFOY! FOOD’S DOWNSTAIRS.”_

Silence.

“They need to move out,” Draco said bluntly, not seriously, no quarter in his eyes as he finished clothing himself in black.

There are charms all over Grimmo to prevent noise cutting through doors or walls or floors. The third floor flat’s internal partitions are an exception, Harry and Draco were gradually coming to realise. They’d been forgotten about, Harry was starting to expect, because no one had imagined that the flat’s front door would ever be taken away.

Biting his lip against laughter, Harry gave in on that Saturday morning. He replied facetiously, holding Draco’s flat eyes in his. “What are you worried about them overhearing?”

With a look of pure malevolence, Draco crossed the floor and Harry let go of his knees, receiving Draco’s body on the bed as he smothered Harry backwards with every stitch of stuffy embroidery. Heat and something like happiness bubbled over Harry’s every nerve, to be kissed, finally, when their faces were an inch from each other’s, and what was that? Sexual arousal? Sexual arousal was what made his dick twitch when someone he didn’t fancy decided to snog him in a club.

He wrapped his arms around razors and buried his fingers in wet hair and held on tight, for a little while, rolling over and onto his back.

Draco’s bed is unnecessarily huge.

“I dunno if you can say that they’re causing _problems_ ,” Harry pointed out a little while later, on his back and caught in the rumpled duvet, out of breath and feeling starstruck, the weight of Draco’s forearm heavy and present like a knife beside his head.

“I’m not the one saying so,” Draco remarked, an odd look in his grey eyes, so close where his face leaned over Harry’s. His energy is never warm, but it was unquestionably urgent right then, like a predator ready to pounce.

“I never said that,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I’m saying… If we could keep them inside the house – or another one,” he suggested, tracing his fingers along the angles of Draco’s urgent face, brushing tails of hair from his eyes. “Somewhere that I don’t have to deal with them at the same time as everything else…”

Frowning, Draco groaned as their eyes met again, sounding weary. “You’re being irrational,” he complained as though it was a sin.

“I’m not being irrational,” Harry scoffed, pressing a finger into the point of Draco’s nose to see if it would prick him. “I’m being strategic.”

“You don’t know what the word means,” Draco mocked him, clearly thinking about things that had happened long ago.

Harry pressed Draco’s nose again, with more fingers. His wrist was taken from him forcefully, held to the mattress, and it felt very nice.

“See,” Harry pointed out, earning a groan, grinning as he was kissed to be shut up, and he rolled Draco onto his back again.

Eventually, of course, Harry made his way downstairs.

He found himself on his own. Ron and Hermione were declining to be up yet, or something, and Draco was finishing his hair.

It put Harry on edge, and it’s possible that he took it out on his dad.

“Well,” Harry’s dad said to whatever Harry had come out with, unfazed, tinkering around with everyone else’s coffee and tea. “You should have thought of that before you were born of my loins.”

His mum snorted with a wink just for Harry, moving her cup to be given some coffee. “ _Your_ loins, James Potter, had only a minor part to play in it.”

Scooping beans onto toast, Sirius belted out a laugh. He was sitting on Harry’s right, as Harry gave in and sat down, right there opposite his dad. The laugh made Harry’s dad look at his mum, open his mouth and close it again, glance at Harry with a flush of embarrassment in his cheeks.

“I don’t need to hear about any of this,” Harry complained, not even sure that he was hungry for breakfast. A boiled egg popped onto his plate in an egg cup, because Kreacher liked to nudge him.

At the end of the table, Lupin finally turned to the right page of the newspaper and hmmed in surprise. “Oh,” he said clearly, and then they were talking about something else.

“What is it?” asked Harry’s dad, not really looking up from pouring his tea.

“You’ve made the news, Harry,” Lupin said, dropping the pages to reveal his warm eyes. There was laughter in them, kind, all a game. “You and the back of Sirius’s head.”

“What?” Sirius himself demanded, still holding a spoon.

Lupin looked at him, past Harry and his egg and his eggcup and his plate, which was bordered with snake-themed Black-family chintz. His expression was saying something, but Harry couldn’t tell what it was.

“Let me have a look at that,” Harry’s mum said, on Lupin’s left. She took the paper and folded it, revealing the society-section headline at last.

 _ **IS THIS THE BOY WHO LIVED’S NEW BEAU?**_ it exclaimed, expecting the wrong answer.

There was a photo taking up a third of the page, which seemed to delight Harry’s mum. It had been shot through the coffee-shop window, at the moment when Sirius had reached out to touch Harry’s wrist. The picture showed Harry’s head flashing up and him blinking, his mouth closed and eyes round in round glasses. He looked ridiculous; he looked _young_. Harry hated it on sight. He tried hard not to look –

“That’s a lovely photo of you, Harrypop,” said his mum, ruffling the image’s hair with her fingers and making Harry in the photograph scowl at her, pull his wrist away from Sirius and hide it from view under the table. “Although…” She frowned, turning the paper, unfolding it again to skim the other stories on the page. “What’s this for _news?_ ” she demanded, sounding annoyed. The end of her questions are always sharp, a bright swoop of sound which catches Harry in the diaphragm. “They shouldn’t be…”

“What does it say?” his dad asked curiously, peering over and squeezing an arm around Harry’s mum’s shoulders. His questions always come out half-hovering, unconcerned as though only rhetorical. Harry’s not sure that he likes them any better.

“Let me read it, James, and I’ll tell you,” said Harry’s mum, a warning in her tone as she sat up straight, brushed off his arm and held the paper directly in front of her.

There was a lump in Harry’s throat, seeing this, but his dad acted as though his mum was annoyed with somebody else. “Well, Padfoot,” he changed direction, mock seriously, taking toast to butter as though there was nothing amiss. “You know what I’m going to say. Try your act on my son, and you won’t be left with the equipment to father your own.”

This made Sirius laugh, down his nose for variation, while Harry felt a hot stab of anger. He didn’t need _defending_ , and certainly not by –

He caught himself before he could snap.

“My _act?_ ” Sirius quoted, sounding pleased with himself and as though the suggestion was far more interesting than Harry and the back of his head. “What act is that? I don’t have an act.”

James scoffed, giving him a look. “Tell that to Maisy Armitage, shall I?” he suggested, pulling names out of nowhere. “Or Eleanor Bletchley, or Jenny Many-Pennyfeather –”

“Julia _Merry_ -Pennyfeather,” Sirius said, “enjoyed her day with me immensely.”

“You abandoned her in Puddifoot’s and left out the back as a dog!” James held up his hand with the knife, toast half-buttered, his expression entirely disbelief. It was his left hand brandishing the knife, Harry observed, which was weird.

Lily was reading slowly, nose and mouth covered by her cup of fresh coffee. Turning to Lupin to attempt camaraderie, Harry rolled his eyes.

“She was _boring_ ,” said Sirius damningly, putting down his cup of tea with a clink.

And Lupin was watching the scene with narrowing eyes, intent.

“You are nothing but a wastrel,” James declared, mostly laughing.

Sirius waved a hand, screwing up his face. “What does it signify,” he scoffed, “to take a girl out to Hogsmeade?”

This was a clear dig. James responded appropriately, aiming his butter knife blade-first across the table and glaring with murk-coloured eyes through his glasses. _Watch it._ Eyes on the paper, Lily put down her coffee and patted James’s arm in a patronising, absent sort of way, which made him look aggrieved. Sirius spared her a glance, smirking.

“Besides,” finished Sirius smugly, meeting James’s eyes again. “Harry’s not a girl.”

There was something off with the arrogant way that he said this, something off with the cocksure way he was sitting. Harry couldn’t put his finger on it. Lupin seemed to notice too, and Harry wondered if this was what he’d been looking for.

Sirius’s attention was entirely on James.

“I know he’s not a girl,” James said, with a knowing look in his eye. It was as though he’d won a point.

It put Sirius on the back foot. He blustered, sitting up straight, looking down at his beans for a moment. “When are you expecting this to happen?” he demanded, something breaking in the air. “By the time he’s fifteen we’ll be practically forty and I’ll be having breakfast in a lovely little house, rather than bothering you. The one we don’t mention will have come to their senses and I’ll…”

The room went still. James froze, staring at Sirius, and he looked nothing like himself. “You’ll do what, Padfoot?”

Sirius stared straight back, the colour draining fast from his face. He squeezed his eyes shut to a blink; he glanced at Lily, taking in her hands and her fingers and her startled expression over the newspaper, and this didn’t seem to help.

He swallowed, looking at James again, before he abruptly pulled himself up and backwards over the bench, transforming into a dog and fleeing up the stairs.

They all rose to their feet.

“Sit _down_ ,” Lupin snapped, and it was at James. Nobody listened. Lupin pulled his wand as though forgetting that he couldn’t disapparate, before crossing the room and tutting in frustration. “Lily, keep him here,” he said, not specifying who.

Harry’s heart was pounding. This is your fault, he wanted to snap at the man who looked like his father.

James Potter looked at him, blinking as though Harry was a stranger. Harry recognised the feeling, because he’d been feeling it for months, on and off.

* * *

After the memorial service is complete, Harry and McGonagall find themselves surrounded on Hogwarts’ unplottable lawn by a great swell of well-wishers, witches and wizards in hats.

“ _Wonderful_ speech,” Elphias Doge is saying to Harry’s face, shaking his hand, Harry’s one in his two. “You brought a tear to my eye, dear boy. Albus would have been so proud.”

“Thank you, Mr Doge,” Harry tells him politely.

“When will you ever stand for election?” Doge goes on, his face drawn and drooping under his hat. “You’ll have my vote. We need more young blood like you.”

“Oh, it’ll be a long time yet.” He aims for humble, meaning _never_. “I’m not terribly political.”

“Harry Potter!” another voice calls out, which Harry doesn’t recognise. He shakes the witch’s hand anyway, smiling again – a different smile. McGonagall’s presence by his side is sharp and prickling like gorse, familiar and grounding.

Another voice, and a few more hands. “Harry Potter! Is it true what they’re saying? I know that there were those _salacious_ rumours, whenever it was, but that man you were with – he’s not…? Of course I would never… It’s only that my Enid will be _so_ disappointed. You were at school together; she started the year before you left on your quest.”

“Oh, er, well.” The woman is staring at him, holding onto his hands and dragging him to her with her words, as though they’re hooks. “I’m sorry; I don’t remember her,” Harry says. He locates a polite-enough question. “What house was she in?”

“Ravenclaw!” the witch seems delighted to answer, her blondish hair heavy and thick. “We all left for Germany, that Christmas,” she admits. “And a good thing we did!”

“Yeah, yeah. Right. Exactly.”

The witch doesn’t leave, still holding Harry’s hand, her eyes pale brown and entreating. Harry doesn’t know what she wants from him.

“What’s she doing these days?” he manages to come up with next.

“How kind of you to ask! She’s taking some time off at the moment, but her father and I –”

McGonagall’s voice comes from somewhere, thank you, Merlin. “I don’t know about Professor Potter, Belladonna, but I could use some lunch. What do you say?” She steers a steely arm around Harry’s shoulders and the witch seems to come out of a trance, letting Harry’s hand go. “Let’s all head inside…”

She cuts a brisk pace up the path, the headmistress, losing Belladonna and the crowd momentarily behind them.

“Should I be surprised?” McGonagall mutters to Harry under her breath. “It was three whole days, I suppose, before Sirius found you both in the paper.”

“I’m pretty sure it was two,” Harry tells her, stage-whispering. “And how’d you see it, anyway? Headmistress,” he remembers to add.

“Some of us like to know what’s going on, Harry,” she tells him, reproving.

“I like being a social recluse,” Harry jokes as they pass up the steps, through the doors, into the dining hall. He assumes that what she’s saying has no double meaning.

The tables have been pushed back against the walls inside the hall, and there’s food, as much as Harry can see. A range of fresh and steaming lunch possibilities, and plates. No sandwiches, though Ginny likely doesn’t care about that, in reality.

All the food is far away, past dozens and hundreds of people. Closer, by the doors, there are hovering silver trays of cut-crystal flutes containing some sort of sparkling wine. It isn’t champagne, Harry finds out when he tries it. It’s sticky and sweet. Wizarding. Difficult.

McGonagall makes a face, just between them. “Albus’s portrait promises that it was his favourite,” she says.

“He doesn’t have to drink it,” Harry points out, trying again.

For the second time this morning, Sunday the fourth of May, McGonagall makes a sound that isn’t quite a snort. She takes a scant sip of her own wine, frowning and severe.

Something repressive in her expression makes Harry’s thoughts turn to Draco. He’s here somewhere, Harry suddenly remembers. He looks for him, glancing around through the crowded hall, the hundreds of people all talking, but he can’t see anyone he knows. There are only unfamiliar eyes, swivelling to meet his. Too many hats.

The feeling of it is oppressive. There’s nothing for it, Harry supposes. He’s made do on his own in similar situations before, and he knows that he can do it again, for one more afternoon. He takes another sip of his drink.

If he’d known that Draco was coming, Harry thinks, frustrated, he would have warned him what his speech was going to be about.

“How is he faring?” McGonagall asks, apparently to make conversation. It takes Harry a moment to realise that she’s talking about Sirius, who isn’t dead. “It must be a shock to come back after all this time. I never did have a chance to speak with him during the war.”

It’s a regret of hers, Harry knows. She told him about it, on one of the few occasions that he’s spoken to her about his own.

“He’s OK,” Harry lies, refusing to feel anything, standing where he is. “He’s… It’s confusing for him. It’s a bit like what he had before, only with the veil rather than the dementors. And then it’s like all of his Christmases have come at once, with my mum and dad, so. It’s overwhelming,” Harry imagines.

“Harry! Minerva!” Professor Slughorn now says, appearing out of nowhere and sweeping to meet them with a glass in his hand. “Wonderful do. Loved the speech, from our second youngest professor!” He winks, clapping Harry on the back, leaving his hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry supposes that it’s a joke, that he’s only the second youngest by a day. “I was saying to Rolphander – that’s one of mine!”

He laughs and they have to laugh with him. Harry nods, drinking his wine, trying to smile as much as he can.

Things go on like this for a while.

“You look exactly like your father,” a wizard is saying to him, later. “But you have your mother’s eyes,” he adds sagely.

“Not really,” Harry mutters under his breath, with a lapse of concentration. He wants to tell the wizard in front of him that his mum has much prettier eyes than he does, and his dad has a much manlier chin.

He’s on his second glass of the sweet fizzy stuff. He and McGonagall haven’t yet made it to the food. He’s grateful, Harry supposes, that she’s sticking to his side instead of leaving him for whatever it is that smells nice, but he suspects that she’s here to protect everyone else, rather than Harry himself.

Performing this role, she redirects the conversation. It’s to something about the Wizengamot. “The latest education bill…”

Harry looks around at the unfamiliar faces, searching. And then –

There. He sees it in the corner, a flash of white blonde hair, finally. It’s Luna’s, but Harry can see her, sitting down in a small cluster of chairs, with Liz who must have come as her guest and who seems to be telling a story. She tells the best stories. Luna’s sitting on her hands and swinging her feet as she listens. Mr Ollivander’s there too, ashen and spotted, dressed in warm grey-green robes.

At Ollivander’s side, against the wall, not sitting on a chair, hidden in the depths of the corner, there’s Draco, looking small and like he wishes he was smaller, dressed in black, holding wine, pointy and sharp and silent, most likely.

He looks nothing like he ever did in school. He’s too controlled and solid in his own skin compared to the day when he cried in Myrtle’s toilets, to the day when he shouted and cried over Crabbe, shouted at Harry to get them out of the fire. He takes up less space than he ever did, but it’s like he’s been drawn into focus rather than shrunk, no longer diffuse. Everything about him was irritating, once, and Harry thinks that it’s because he was captivating. He just didn’t make sense, too fuzzy at the edges.

Also, he wasn’t very kind, but that’s true of many people whom Harry went to school with.

Looking at Draco now sets Harry squarely in the present, his way home assured, as though the rest of this room, the rest of today isn’t quite his real life. Inevitably, he finds himself staring, captivated by the sight of Draco _listening_ , not looking away until Draco looks up, which he does in the end, his eyes flashing and his chin lifting as he notices himself being watched.

It’s almost funny to meet his eyes here in this hall. It’s funny because Draco’s reaction is to have no reaction whatsoever. This millennium’s Draco Malfoy still sneers sometimes, still jeers, still mocks, but never in a room like this. He’s flirting, usually, when he does those things now, and it tends to stoke Harry’s blood in different, much more concentrated ways. Here in the great hall of Hogwarts, wearing this expression of nothing – Harry sees it as the second layer between Draco and the world, a reminder that the first has long been stripped away, except on the occasion it comes back. It’s the promise that revelation is possible; the hint of revelation to come.

Harry can admit that he finds it erotic, simply to look at him, if only inside his own head. It’s like looking at those half-naked, wide-eyed women who leap around paintings in the National Gallery, their clothes falling off. (“This is high art, Harry,” Auntie Dromeda has told him, as though it’s a crime that he’s found himself turned on.)

Forgetting everything else, here in the great hall of Hogwarts, Harry lifts his eyebrows, trying to set out a question mark. _All right?_

This is ignored. Instead, Draco looks back at him, glances down at the glass of wine in his hand and makes his own querying expression of disgust, a subtle twitch near his sinuses. It hits Harry sharply, even if it means that the answer to his question is _no_.

 _Potter, what the fuck are we drinking?_ Harry imagines the question.

Harry shrugs, taking another, much easier swallow from the glass in his hand. He’s getting used to the taste. _Dumbledore_ , he mouths, trying not to roll his eyes because it wouldn’t be appropriate.

 _Merlin, really?_ Exasperation. Guilt. Sorrow. The conflict in Draco’s demeanour is clear to Harry in the moment that he glances towards the great doors. Draco feels terribly about Dumbledore, Harry knows, despite the most important point of the story – the look on Draco’s face and the way that he lowered his wand.

But then – Draco also has irrepressibly strong opinions about wine, because at his core he’s a fussy dickhead snob, and nothing can take that away.

Dropping his eyes and then glancing to meet Harry’s, Draco takes a measured, resigned sip from his flute. He grimaces almost invisibly as he swallows. _Ugh._

It makes Harry laugh, quite suddenly and quite urgently, out loud, even as his heart turns over itself.

Draco’s eyes flash to his, bright and revealing.

And then the expression vanishes and he’s –

“Something amusing, Professor Potter?” asks McGonagall, making Harry turn back towards her. The elderly wizard she’s been talking to looks dismayed.

“Oh. Er. No,” Harry manages, tipping back his glass and pretending that he cares about every last sugary drop. A tray hovers to his side, right on cue, and he swaps this second empty glass for one full.

McGonagall has two eyebrows raised, her first glass still full to an inch.

“I say!” the old wizard then says, his expression aghast as he catches sight of something over Harry’s shoulder. “Is that Lucius Malfoy’s son? Here? Today?” Harry curses himself to Azkaban. “I oversaw the Bardley trials; young Malfoy cannot –”

Harry looks to the ceiling, blue sky, and he tries not to snap. He can feel blood in his face; he’s already hot from what he’s been looking at.

McGonagall tries to smooth things over. “He was a student at the time of the war. As we agreed in the meeting –”

“He contributed directly –”

“He has a right to –”

Looking at blue sky, Harry sees a name on a file in his head. “I was the investigating officer on Bardley,” he says, looking down, feeling confused. He was a junior officer from Misuse of Muggle Artefacts, assigned to a case which he shouldn’t have been involved with, by the end, but the DMLE is the DMLE and the name was his name in the box. It made him famous again for a bit, that case. The move to Hogwarts afterwards. “If you oversaw the trials, then you know that Draco Malfoy consulted on behalf of the Department of Mysteries, helped solve everything. His wards allowed for the arrests. It was all there in the file.” There was a lot of fudging too, by necessity, but no one expects anything from MOMA.

“I….” The old wizard is spluttering, embarrassed, going red. It seems clear to Harry that he doesn’t actually remember.

“There we are,” McGonagall concludes, unreadable. It was because of the Bardley fiasco that McGonagall offered Harry a job.

And it’s a satisfying end to the conversation, sort of, as the wizard makes his excuses. There’s no reason for the deep wave of desperation that floods through Harry, dragging on his chest, but he feels it thickly anyway. He doesn’t understand much of anything, it feels like sometimes.

“I’m going to get some food, Professor,” Harry manages, before he turns away from McGonagall and downs his next glass of wine in one.

He wants nothing more than to leave – to find Draco, to feel his hand in his own or the point of his knee or his shoulder or his cock. His blood has rushed south and it’s embarrassing, how it must be visible in his robes, if anyone’s looking. That’s where everyone’s looked at him from the age of eighteen, no matter that they still call him a boy. He wants to be somewhere else – anywhere else – but he doesn’t want the rigmarole of everyone asking him tomorrow why he left, where he went, if he’s all right, making up a story about it.

It would cause a scene if Harry went to Draco, he knows. Leaning to the wall and holding his hand – even sitting and talking with him and Ollivander and Luna and Liz; it would all be a terrible scene, drawing attention. It would be a scene to find Ron and Hermione and hide in their company, because he shouldn’t want that either, should he? They do their thing and he does his own. They’ve both long been old before their time, not like Harry, which makes sense, because that Hermione has always been too serious. She likely never lets Ron out. Harry shouldn’t let her or anyone else tell him that he can’t live his life. He’s done enough; he’s so young. He needs to give them space; bit weird, isn’t it, clinging to a couple who want to spend time with each other?

The only thing that Harry can do, it feels like, is what he does. He falls into the crowd, swapping his empty glass for another and downing that too, though the wine fizzes sweet on his tongue, clinging like film to his teeth.

Fax Bardley was Professor of Defence against the Dark Arts after the war, the last before Harry, and he was trying to bring Voldemort back from the dead. Harry found photos of old Slytherin quidditch teams in the drawers of his private rooms’ desk, the day that he moved into Hogwarts. One or two included Lucius Malfoy’s son, barely pointy, too young, sat in the centre of the quidditch team’s front row.

It was the first time that Harry’d ever considered Draco Malfoy’s innocence, that day. It was the middle of July, not long after Harry had held him while he’d not cried for his parents, still a couple of weeks before he’d hold him while he did.

This isn’t to say that it was any consideration of great length. It was instinct more than anything, seeing those faces in that drawer, Malfoy’s own – a reaction. It was outrage and prickling, horrible suspicion, because by 2004 Harry had come by a filthy mind. He took the photographs and burned them, never mentioned them to anyone, washed his hands, found the right charms to sand and re-varnish the desk, changed the chair. The work was sloppy at best; he expects that the house elves have long since corrected it in the night.

At the memorial, with this in mind, Harry finds another tray and swaps his glass, drinks the next and takes another, holds it to his lips, breathing and feeling the bubbles tingle up his nose. He doesn’t feel good about himself. He feels nervous, on edge.

“ _Raz_ zle Dazzle Potter,” someone addresses him wearily, their gentle hand reaching out to squeeze his wrist. They sigh, and Harry tingles with nerves as though he’s not yet nineteen. “What are you doing with that?”

It’s Ginny. Of course it’s her. She’s always here in these moments, apart from the times when she isn’t. “Leave off, Gin,” Harry tries to tell her. She has her own crowds to entertain.

“ _I’m cutting down, Gin,_ ” she mocks him, her eyes warm and alight, her hair coming out around her face in elegant wisps. “ _It used to be fun, but when you scam on your mates it stops being fun, doesn’t it?_ ” Her Harry voice is gruff and somehow dopey, as though this is the way that she sees him. She sounds more like Neville, Harry thinks.

She takes the glass out of his hand, knocking back a swig for herself. “Give it here,” Harry tells her. The crowd is busy around them, the ceiling the sky but echoing all the same.

“ _We’re still mates, aren’t we, Gin?_ ” This version of him sounds pathetic. “ _It’s so embarrassing. I’ve messed it all up. I was having it off with this bloke, Gin, on the sly, but now it’s over. Oh, I’m so sad; please forgive me; I’m so lonely; I’m sorry_.” This isn’t at all what he said.

Really, Harry isn’t sure what point Ginny’s trying to make. He feels hot, though his pulse is slowing down. The world shifts a little, and he feels the wine going straight to his head. He feels ill, actually. Definitely ill.

“It’s not over, though, is it, Haz?” Ginny demands, giving him a look with brown eyes. “I always knew it was him,” she adds scathingly, clothed in magenta. “I told Nev he was mad, so there, you’ve made us both look like prats.”

Harry swallows, feeling horribly guilty.

“Is this your plan to rehabilitate him?” Ginny asks. Her brown eyes are shrewd, and she’s a game-player, an excellent one. “Bum Snape until no one hates Slytherin and then take him out for a slap-up meal? I liked the thing with Sirius,” she adds pointedly. “Remind people you’re bi and work up to it, yeah.”

She isn’t impressed. She thinks he’s using Fred, maybe.

“Of course I'm not doing that,” Harry tells her flat, wishing he had a drink. He glances over his shoulder to get a measure of the seething crowd. There are no journalists that he can see. “I wrote all that ages ago – and I’m not…” He’s not that sophisticated. The speech was supposed to have been ring composition, going back to what he’d said at the end of it all.

Ginny doesn’t believe him. Harry can tell by her flaring nose and the fire in her eyes.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Harry tells her directly, glancing around for his lost silver tray. “I can’t hear myself think in here…”

Another turn of booze swings through his head because he hasn’t yet eaten today, and Harry shuts his eyes, tasting sugar, trying to imagine cool water and maybe a frog, hopping and whimsical (“Let’s live a little, Harry…”).

He feels like he could go to sleep where he’s standing.

When he comes back to himself, Ginny’s looking at him, brown eyes and red hair and sympathy, now, striking pink and yellow robes like Fred would have chosen for her. They clash awfully.

“Go and sit things out for a bit,” Ginny tells him, forever better at whatever this is than him. Like Neville, who’s always had it under control. Like Matías, most likely; why not? “Go outside and look up.”

She makes him look up, to where the great hall’s sky is bright blue.

Once upon a time he’d have seen a sky like today’s and gone flying, Harry thinks. Another time, Ginny would have been trying to make him come with her.

“There’s only so long that you can listen to the old gits in here, fawning like _you_ are all that,” Ginny’s saying now, with a wink.

“But I’m the boy who lived,” Harry jokes, grinning at the look on her face.

She gasps as though caught in a shudder of romance, pressing a hand to her chest. “And in another life we would have made such beautiful children,” she declares, mock-wistfully. “Although,” she conspires, her eyes gleaming, “have you _seen_ my fiancé? He’s fitter than you, Haz.”

“I know,” Harry says, because she seems to expect his agreement. “How’d you manage that? He doesn’t even wear glasses.” He pushes his own up his nose.

“Fuck yeah,” Ginny confirms, her brown eyes aflame, her grin broad, and she’s obnoxious.

For a single sudden sharp moment, Harry wants her. Badly. He’s turned on from before and it makes him cringe, because he’s not sure that he ever did want her, actually. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with her. They settled on this for Christmas, 1998, no matter how often Draco used to tell him that they would end up together. At the moment of death –

Ginny’s giving him a look now, as if she can see from his face exactly what he’s thinking. “Go and contemplate your emotions,” she instructs, as she likely should have told him ten years ago. Her eyes are flat earth as she puts up her guard. It’s so much like Draco’s, though Ginny’s resting expression is soft. She’s Draco’s opposite, really, only ever putting on a guise, her kind heart needing to be hidden. “Then come with us to George’s.” She rattles this off briskly, putting distance between them, leaving Harry because he long ago hurt her, always and ever again, his own heart surely something other than kind. “There’s live jazz. I’m rounding everyone up.”

* * *

With another glass of wine, Harry doesn’t head outside. He returns to his office, which is only up two flights of stairs. Passing his desk and his bookshelves and Puff, who’s perched, maybe sleeping – though he wakes at the sound of the door and breathes pompoms, making Harry smile – Harry goes straight through the door at the back, into the holder of his position’s private rooms. The wards are stronger here.

The living area is cosy, full of green and red upholstery like Christmas. There’s a cast-iron kettle by the fire, with which – if Harry insists – he’s able to make his own cup of tea. It never comes out as well as the elves’. There’s the private desk, the one he re-varnished, covered in baskets of essays, rolled up and ready to be marked, and they are naturally _going_ to be marked, before the next lesson that he has with each class.

There’s a bathroom and a bedroom off this living space. The bathroom is heavy pipes and a claw-foot enamel bath, which Harry’s set up to stream bubbles that smell like seaweed and sunshine. The bedroom houses a bed which is much like the one he spent six of seven years in, maroon with four posts and curtains, just as Godric would have wanted.

It’s cooler, out of the hall, and Harry can feel his energy dropping, his sugar high gone and his adrenaline gone and the sticky wine doing its job. He doesn’t want Ginny. He never did. He doesn’t want Malfoy either, does he, really? He doesn’t want anything at all, and that’s better.

Half an hour, Harry decides. He rubs his face, the odd errant tears from his eyes, and he crawls up the bed to lie down on it, kicking off his shoes and curling up into his robes. He doesn’t contemplate his emotions. He goes to sleep.

* * *

Leaving breakfast, Harry thinks that he should keep going. But the glazed doors to the conservatory are open, and it’s clear that Sirius and Lupin are outside. The door to the garden is open, the wind blustering to make it swing and Harry’s willing to take the risk that they won’t notice if he pauses just short of the step, in the shadow of the doorframe.

Sirius is pacing, his socks likely getting damp in the dew. The sky is overcast; the clouds are moving visibly with the late-April breeze. Sirius’s hair is all in his face and he keeps having to wrench it out of his eyes.

For the first time, Harry sees Lupin pull something from his shirt pocket and a cigarette from that. He’s standing perfectly still, hands moving with a clatter and a click and a quick rush of flame. He goes from not smoking to breathing in poison, lit up, in a single casual movement. He breathes out a lungful of smoke directly at Sirius’s back, the breath streaming for what seems like too long, as though Lupin’s lost in the thought of it.

It makes Harry blink. He owes Draco a pint, he thinks, because Draco’s been saying all along that Lupin smokes. It seems about right, that Harry never knew.

“From the _top_ ,” Lupin’s commanding, shaking himself, forceful but patient, a teacher with a panicking student, and Harry recognises the tone. Not the cigarette, which goes back in Lupin’s mouth. He’s not sure how he feels about it.

“I don’t need to take it from the top,” Sirius is telling him, the words quick. “I need to be less fucking insane.”

“From the top, Sirius,” Lupin repeats, entirely calm.

“What’s the point? There’s no fucking –“

“We take from the top until you get it right,” explains Lupin, watching him.

Harry’s holding onto the door frame, his nose itching, his neck and his collarbone. His heart is in his throat. He _knew_ that something was off with the four of them. He’s known it all along.

“What is your name and what’s mine?” Lupin asks Sirius, out in the garden.

Sirius forces hair out of his face, fighting against the wind and still pacing. “Sirius Black and Remus Lupin,” he declares in a haughty tone of voice, and this seems to be an easy one.

“What year is it?”

This is supposed to be an easy one too, Harry guesses.

Sirius answers quickly enough. Too quickly. “Nineteen-ninety-fi–” he begins, and Harry’s heart lurches. “Fuck,” Sirius interrupts himself, pacing and staring at the grass. “Six. No. No. _Fuck_ ,” he goes on, panicking, unseeing. “Nineteen-eigh… Se… _Two-thousand_ ,” he finally reaches, relieved, looking up. “Two-thousand-and…” He shakes his head, disbelieving. “Eight,” he decides, his expression a question mark as he looks over to Lupin.

“Are you asking me or telling me?” Lupin asks wryly, puffing out a short burst of smoke.

“Fuck off,” Sirius snaps at him, without any heat. He pulls hair out of his face. “We dwell in anno domini 2008, year of the muggle lord, and why do we bother with that?” He goes back to pacing. “Merlin fucking…”

“How old are we?” Lupin interrupts, his expression entirely unfazed. He’s flicking out ash to the grass.

Sirius laughs, a short bark of it. “Forty-eight, I believe,” he seems to calculate, glancing back, his expression playful. “Looking Merlin-cursed good for it.”

Lupin is standing barely beyond the decking, so Harry can see the smirk that pulls at his mouth. “That is _entirely_ subjective,” he says, sounding like he doesn’t want to be amused – sounding like he fancies Harry’s godfather really quite a bit. Harry’s not sure how he feels about this either.

Sirius scoffs, and the tone of it makes Harry look away. “I am being the definition of –”

“How old is Harry?” cuts in the next question, pulling Sirius up short.

It makes Harry startle too, his gaze catching on Lupin again, who’s staring, intent.

“Twenty-eight,” answers Sirius promptly, getting it wrong. “Fuck,” he amends, with a short edge of frustration. “Twenty-seven, twenty- _seven_ ,” he corrects, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “That wasn’t… He’s a good little late-born Leo, isn’t he? Born on the thirty-first of July, which it can’t be, not yet.”

“Mm,” Lupin agrees, the pair of them looking at each other in the blustery garden. “I should probably have asked you the month,” he concedes.

“What month _is_ it?” Sirius asks. He glances to Draco’s cherry tree at the end of the lawn, coming into blossom. “No one’s told me.”

“April,” Lupin answers, in an odd tone of voice. Disbelieving? Fond? “For a few days more.”

They’re staring at each other, and again Harry wonders how they ever got away with it. He can’t read the look that they’re sharing, but he isn’t sure that he wants to. It’s like something from a painting.

Lupin looks away first, also to the end of the garden. “Where’s James?” he asks the next question, his tone suggesting nothing.

“What?” comes Sirius’s response, distant. He seems to be feeling calmer now, convinced that he’s all right. “Moony, he’s dead,” he says, getting it wrong, and Harry wishes that he hadn’t seen this coming, a prickle in his eyes. “I remember; you don’t have to keep going.”

Lupin’s jaw tightens, and Harry feels torn. “What year is it?” Lupin asks harshly, going backwards.

“2008,” replies Sirius, short and frustrated. “Why –”

“How old are we?” Lupin is looking past Sirius now, straight at the boundary wall that cuts off number 12 from number 11.

“For fuck’s sake – _forty-eight_ ,” Sirius snarls, glaring at him. The wind rushes around them. Harry has to let the door smack against the side of his leg.

“How old is Harry?” comes the same ruddy question.

“Twenty-buggering-seven.”

“And where’s James?”

Sirius snaps. “He’s downstairs,” he spits out, aiming an arm towards the house, daring Lupin to contradict him. “He’s having breakfast with Lily and being a twat about some piece in the newspaper.”

Saying nothing, Lupin takes another drag on his cigarette.

Emotion flares brightly across Sirius’s face, and he bursts out laughing, the break in tension hitting Harry between the eyes. The stiffness in his posture drops away and he’s laughing in the garden, lost and shaking his head, dragging on his face with his hands. “It makes no bloody sense,” he insists.

“Yes it _does,_ ” Lupin tells him, torn and patient, pinning him with a glare. His voice is cracking a little, to Harry’s ears, but that could be the smoke. “I’ve explained it to you, so you can explain it to me.”

It’s time to leave.

“Yes. _Yes_. All right.” The last thing Harry hears is Sirius’s shuddering breath, before he goes into recitation, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. _“The Killing Curse,_ ” he says, the words the beginning of a lecture, his tone tortured. _“Rather than sui generis, it may be better understood as an appendix to Viridian…_ To Viridian... _To Viridian Category D._ Fuck. _This allows us to make – three separate but interconnected...”_

The words are familiar, somehow. Harry isn’t sure from where. He knows his Viridian well: Category D curses are the malediction type, which distorts the relationship between elements of a body or an object, rather than binding (A), destroying (B) or adding to them (C).

It’s a mess of a system, first put forward in 1885. Sometimes Harry thinks about writing a new reference book which puts forward another.

It doesn’t matter for now. With a final squeeze of the doorframe, he turns around and leaves for the hall –

– and jumps about a foot in the air to find his mum watching him, herself leaning against the conservatory’s internal doors, arms crossed. A warm, wry frown has settled between her eyes.

“Er.”

“You shouldn’t linger in doorways, Harrypop,” she says sternly.

“I wasn’t –”

She tuts, Harry’s mum. There’s a twinkle in the green of her eyes, and Harry’s missed it, the joke – because she’s doing her own lingering, isn’t she?

“I was worried,” Harry tries, really not sure how to talk to her.

“It’s only a blip,” she says confidently, her arms crossed.

Harry feels himself turning bright red. “Yeah,” he agrees.

“Potter –” his mother says next, but it isn’t her, is it?

It’s someone else.

“Potter, wake up. I’ve brought you lunch.”

Harry jumps, sitting up, waking up. He rubs his eyes open, glasses crooked and digging painfully into his nose. “What are you doing in here?”

Malfoy’s standing there, looking at him sceptically, pale and dressed in black. He’s holding a gold-rimmed Hogwarts plate of potato salad and salmon in his hands. “Oh, how the tables have turned,” he says dryly, no matter that he only ever once told Harry to leave.

“Seriously, Malfoy,” Harry says, peering behind him through the door to the sitting room, fixing his glasses on his face. “No one should be able to get in here.”

Long-suffering, Malfoy sighs. He offers an explanation as though it’s beneath him. “I looked into your father’s infiltration of my flat. There is a consistent flaw in your warding technique.”

Harry doesn’t bother asking what the flaw is. He’ll have to find it himself, or else he’ll never be able to fix it. It’s annoying. His bloody father. Bloody Malfoy. Bloody Lupin. Bloody – everything.

Because he’s far from sober, Harry throws a hex at the fireplace. A rainbow of bright sparks flashes and spits against black. It doesn’t make him feel better.

“Yes,” Malfoy says simply, the git. “Now, what am I doing with this?” he asks, gesturing with his plate. He’s cutlery too, Harry can see. Ridiculous. “Your salmon’s getting cold.”

Harry doesn’t want salmon. “Have you eaten today?” he asks instead, still annoyed, because he knows that the answer will be _no_.

As predicted, the question itself seems to come as a surprise. Malfoy frowns, looking down at the food. “It’s your lunch,” he repeats, like an idiot.

“And now it’s yours,” Harry concludes, shuffling over on the bed and not really sure what he’s doing. “Sit down.” His robes are all tangled everywhere.

“You must be hungry,” Malfoy encourages him, and it’s true.

“I’ll be fine,” Harry says, and this is true too.

Huffing, Malfoy gets a sharp look in his eye. He holds the plate out in front of him. “Hover this,” he commands, and Harry complies out of spite.

With his wand, then, Malfoy doubles the cutlery in his hand, passing a set over to Harry. He transfigures a plate from Harry’s water glass. Then, and this is ridiculous, he stands still for a moment and promptly conjures what looks like a second helping of potato and a second steaming piece of pink salmon.

It’s impossible. It makes Harry blink. It renders a particularly stressful time in his life obsolete as a lesson in magic.

“Did you conjure that from downstairs?” Harry demands, looking between the two plates, which seem to be very much the same.

“No,” Draco says simply, now dashing his wand towards his feet to undo his laces and loosen his shoes. Frowning, he concedes, “That might have been easier.”

“ _Gamp_ –” Harry complains, even as Draco climbs elegantly onto the bed with his food.

“One cannot multiply cooked food,” Draco tells him, as though Harry’s asking something else. He leaves space between them. “The original aspect is distorted –”

“You can’t conjure _any_ food,” Harry snaps, the thicker smell of Draco’s conjured salmon making his stomach cramp.

Draco says nothing, glancing at the plate which Harry is hovering. “Are you going to eat that?” he asks, sitting there by Harry’s side.

Harry looks at the other plate in Draco’s hands. “We’re swapping,” he decides, ill-tempered. “You’re having the real one.”

Once this is done, on the back of Draco’s second heavy sigh, they are both soon eating from bobbing hovered plates.

Eventually, Draco explains. “The rule of the first Principal Exception is that one cannot conjure that which sustains,” he tells Harry. “Life is the source of magic, and one cannot wish on a well for more wishes.” He’s loading his fork with an elegant bite. “It may be the closest thing we have to a physical law.” Food vanishes, the fork tines clean as they reappear.

It’s unduly irritating, watching him, that Harry’s salmon tastes oily and meaty and perfect, the potatoes crisp with sour cream.

“There have been experiments in the last decade,” Draco goes on, after swallowing.

He is so posh. Harry doesn’t know why he never noticed. It’s arousing for no reason at all.

“Recognition of food is subjective, so the problem is one of perspective. It doesn’t always work, but I’ve found that if one occludes the _need_ –”

Arousal forgotten, Harry clinks his golden knife and fork against the edge of his hovering plate. It will hold for a few minutes more. “You don’t _do_ that,” he insists, his mouth still a little full.

Draco looks at him, his grey eyes amused. “I sent in a note to a journal two years ago. They couldn’t replicate the result.”

Swallowing, Harry looks at him harder. There’s an edge to him, and he’s occluding something now. “Why are you angry with me?” Harry asks him, taking a guess.

“You’re projecting,” Draco dismisses, clearly lying as he goes back to his food.

Even as he does the same, Harry refuses to let it go. “I dunno what that means. That I’m angry with you? I’m not angry with you,” he insists, though he is a bit, maybe. It’ll only be sexual frustration, Harry decides. As for everyone else –

“I don’t think that you’re angry with me,” says Draco simply, and something in his voice makes Harry accept that he’s telling the truth. He says nothing else, though, and that’s frustrating.

“I’d have told you beforehand if I’d known that you’d be here,” Harry says, thinking back again to his speech. “I know that you didn’t like Snape by the end –“

“The message of your speech was that even Slytherin can be redeemed,” Draco interrupts, looking down. “Why wouldn’t I have liked it?”

They continue in silence, and Harry stews. At times like this, his frustration is legitimate irritation, he’s sure, because that wasn’t the point of his speech and the idea that it was makes Harry sound like a dick. _Even._ “I wanted them to realise that things aren’t always what they seem,” he defends himself eventually. And Snape _was_ a hero, not that Harry much believes in the word.

“And the end always justifies the means,” replies Draco darkly, quite a way through his lunch now. “As long as _really_ he loved you –”

“Snape never cared for me at all,” Harry interrupts, because he’s certain of this. Out of all of the memories he once saw, he can still see Snape tearing Lily to keep from a Potter family photo, abandoning Harry and James to the dust under Sirius’s chest of drawers. “He hated my dad and he hated me for being his. That’s always been true.”

“He protected you for being your mother’s son,” Draco argues, his expression unreadable.

“He kept souvenirs of the time when they were both innocent,” Harry tells his pale eyes, not meaning to sound jaded. “There weren’t loads, but one of them was me. I think he thought that one day I’d remind him…” He finds it distasteful to say, glancing down, stabbing his last potato to shove it in his mouth. Lily Potter is lovely; he’s not. “He never lived for anything besides that, and I never did remind him, so it’s not really a surprise that he’s dead.” And isn’t that ironic, Harry thinks, given where they are now?

The last of his food on his fork, Draco puts down his knife and sets his hand on Harry’s thigh over green robes. The feeling of it is steady and sure, though the gesture is smooth rather than squeezing.

“I don’t find your mother attractive,” Draco says simply, once he’s swallowed. His expression is mocking, promising a great deal.

A grin grows across Harry’s face, despite himself. “But do you fancy _me?_ ” he asks, his wand in his hand to banish their plates somewhere else.

Draco’s eyes drop to Harry’s mouth, his hand sweeping even as he brandishes his fork. “Your face is _covered_ in grease,” he observes, not really complaining.

“Is it?”

He almost allows a laugh to escape as Harry turns and gropes up his knees. His legs writhe. “Get off me.”

It’s hilarious, to have him here in Harry’s Hogwarts bed. Harry kisses his cheek, sloppy and not without oil, taking hold of his fist. “It’s very unattractive,” Harry insists, pretending to be Draco with that word, _unattractive_ ; kissing him again, closer to his mouth.

“For fuck’s sake,” Draco tells him, exasperated. He takes Harry’s jaw and kisses him properly, just once, not for long, salmony, absolutely perfect, world-turning, world-shifting, before pulling back. “You’re a disgrace,” he declares, eyes on Harry’s, not meaning it. His thumb brushes the skin of Harry’s cheek.

“You only get better,” Harry pretends that he isn’t admitting, looking down at the space between their noses. He wipes the grease off Draco’s chin.

Eyebrows tensing in the slightest of serious frowns, Draco doesn’t reply.

With a sharp breath into his lungs, which makes his head spin a little, Harry sits back and changes the subject.

“I’m worried about Sirius,” he says, wiping his mouth.

Draco’s leans into the space between them, hand to the duvet. “No you’re not,” he says easily, watching Harry’s eyes.

“No I am,” insists Harry, pushing his glasses up his nose. “My dad keeps…” He doesn’t want to explain, shaking his head. “I’m not sure Moony’s…”

“You don’t know to _talk_ to Sirius.” Draco says it so easily, so close, and Harry doesn’t how he’s ever come to this conclusion. “You think that you’re responsible for him, or maybe he’s responsible for you.” He says it all calmly, clear-eyed. “You’re worried that he’s going to run off with Lupin and leave you; you’re worried that Lupin’s going to break his heart and you’ll have to pick up the pieces.”

There are things Harry told Draco in the Forest of Dean; he still remembers them. “I just think that Uncle Moony’s acting weird,” Harry says anyway, because it’s true.

“So you said,” agrees Draco, recalling his and Harry’s conversation from four o’clock this morning.


	3. A memorial, part 3

Harry couldn’t sleep, the night before the memorial.

Beside him, half-hidden under grey, Draco was curled up in a ball, his spine long and curved and jutting out like the ridge of a shell.

It isn’t useful to touch Draco when he’s sleeping like this, Harry knows and knew then. He only wakes up, and from there – as ever – it’s entirely poor odds that he’ll be able to settle back down.

Not that Harry’s made a study of this. He doesn’t have Draco’s insomnia; nothing like it. If Harry can’t sleep, it’s only ever from nerves, or oversleeping during the day, or too much caffeine, or a combination of these three. Waking up after he’s drunk too much. Normal things.

He knew that he was feeling nervous, the night before the memorial. The reasons were several: he knew that he was going to have to leave, like every other weekend since Easter. He knew that he was going to have to trust that his dad and his mum and Lupin would still be at Grimmo when he came back, and Sirius with them. He knew that he was going to have to keep himself together, so that no one besides Neville or McGonagall would catch on that something was off, just like every other week that had passed. He knew that he was going to have to give a speech in the morning, the first one in public since he’d told Voldemort to try killing him for the second time in less an hour.

He didn’t know how it was going to go, in the dead of night. He was only able to imagine himself not nearly thirty but a child, barely alive and only able to guess, balanced on the brink of it all going wrong.

Making a decision, Harry left Draco to slip out of bed, pulling on his jeans and yesterday’s t-shirt.

It was going to take a good amount of time, later in the summer, surely, to knit four more people into Grimmo’s wards. But the thought had struck Harry last weekend that he could at least find a way to let his parents and Sirius and Lupin apparate in and out, up and down stairs. That was basic hospitality, he settled on now. A project for the night time, which might only take a couple of hours. It would make the four of them feel at home in Grimmauld Place, in the present, which was important.

And if it happened that Harry fell asleep, looking things up and drawing the triangles, that was fine too.

Harry keeps his rune reference and his warding map and his notebook and his almanac on a high shelf down in the breakfast room. They’re kept with a few other reference works and the slim guide to wandlore which Ollivander once told him contains as much as anyone could ever need (“One cannot learn live trees from dead wood, Mr Potter.”). These things sit next to the second-hand cookery books Molly Weasley gave Harry for his birthday, optimistically, when he first started living in the house.

Two hours after getting up, early on that Sunday morning, the fourth of May, 2008, Harry had the scratch-parchment map of Grimmo’s wards spread out flat to take over the breakfast table, and he was finishing his draft for four new spokes – to be readily removed or improved later on, allowing for passage in and out of the house.

As usual, completing this part had only revealed the next job: all the lines to do with Draco’s flat were redundant now. They didn’t make sense. They needed to be repurposed or written out. He already had a list of a dozen ideas for the summer.

Harry’d an empty glass of firewhiskey by the side of his map. It hadn’t put him to sleep. There wasn’t a single drop left in the glass, but he was holding firm, forbidding himself more.

“Oh. Harry – it’s you.”

At the mild sound of this voice, Harry jumped, his quill splatting ink in three dots across his work.

“Sorry.” And there was Lupin, watching him, lingering at the bottom of the stairs. “I saw the light on,” he didn’t really explain. “What are you doing down here?”

Grimmo belongs to Harry these days, and Lupin is a guest, so the question should have been the other way round. Yet when Harry looked up at Lupin, it felt like they were in a house which remained full of doxies, where Harry was sharing with Ron in a jerry-rigged half-size room on the second floor. Lupin was a distant figure at the bottom of the basement stairs, jovial and informative and sexless, a teacher.

It had made sense at the time, Harry thought to himself as the present returned. Ten years on, now that Harry had Teddy and Teddy had Ron and Hermione and Draco, the only thing clear was what Lupin hadn’t been.

“Nothing special,” Harry answered finally, swapping quill for wand so that he could siphon off the spilled ink and fix what had been underneath it. “Couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d try and tack you all into the wards. A stopgap till the summer.” His voice was rough and worn from the whiskey; he didn’t sound like a fifteen-year-old.

Lupin chuckled at him, coming closer. The sound of his laughter was light and charming, no matter that they’d never been friends. “When on earth did you come up with all this?” he asked, leaning over the bench to rest a hand on the table and look.

Harry was standing on the bench’s other side, right up at the table, one knee cocked to rest his leg where he should have been sitting. There was a crick in his neck, which he tried to get rid of by forcing back his shoulders. He set his quill down on the inkpot.

“Don’t look at it,” Harry told Lupin, waving a hand to try and hide the angles and scribblings, too tired to blush. He spoke before thinking. “Hermione calls it the work of a lunatic.”

“That’s hardly PC,” Lupin came back with adroitly, frowning as he looked from North to South to West to East. “Does it all do what it’s supposed to?” he asked. Then he answered himself. “Mm, yes, I remember, when James threw his strop and jinxed Draco.”

“It’s a hobby,” Harry insisted, because he didn’t want to pretend that he was _proud_ of his wards. That wasn’t why he’d put them together. “It’s all basic. Alarms and stuff, to let us know what’s going on.”

“You are so much like your father,” Lupin muttered, tutting, his frown far too interested as he let his fingers touch the oldest part of the sketch. As he clambered over the bench.

Harry wasn’t sure what Lupin meant by this, and he wasn’t sure that he liked it, so he pretended that he hadn’t heard. It was a cue to shut up, nonetheless.

“Whatever happened to quidditch?” Lupin asked, more audibly.

This particular question is one which Harry hates. “No one to play it with,” he told Lupin, not really lying.

“Mm,” Lupin accepted. His fingers came to the end of a sequence of runes which was really no more complicated than a sequence on a puzzle box. “This is the pattern for the Thieves’ Labyrinth,” he recognised, diverted.

“Yeah.” It’s famous, the Thieves’ Labyrinth. It’s in all the books. “I souped it up a bit.” Anyone who tries to steal something quintessential to number 12, Grimmauld Place will find their path ever turned towards its centre. Quite what would count as quintessential to Grimmo is unknown, because no one’s ever broken in. The house remains unplottable, though Harry knows where it is, and they’ve lain a couple of secrets on top of that, from before Harry first cast the wards.

“The rest is entirely beyond me,” Lupin told him here in the morning, his eyebrows raised and guileless, as though Harry was giving him a test (“As your former Defence against the Dark Arts teacher…”).

“Well,” allowed Harry, a little unnerved to be talking about this with Professor Lupin, who wasn’t him really. He was Teddy’s dad, Harry decided, this tall, attractive man whom Harry didn’t know, with Teddy’s sharp yellow-brown eyes, a nose that made him look like he was laughing.

He came back at the end of March, and since the middle of April he’s had his hair barbered in an old-fashioned, vaguely 1950s style, which Harry imagines that Ginny and Angelina, who know about these things, would in fact judge to be painfully cool.

Why are you awake? Harry wanted to ask the man next to him, early in the morning on Sunday the fourth of May.

He didn’t, though. Instead, Harry settled into a role with which he was comfortable. “All warding’s the same thing, really,” he explained the overreaching principle, resting his eyes on his drawing, speaking measuredly into cool silence. “It’s about translating the house into magic, then translating magic into the house.”

“Oh, just like that,” Teddy’s dad mocked him, as though they were sharing a joke. Harry could still feel himself being thrown backwards, the one time when they’d spoken to each other as equals.

“I didn’t think that we needed the house to protect us,” Harry carried on, not acknowledging the joke. “It was more that I wanted to know when it needed protecting. And that’s worked out for the best, because it’s ours now, this place, rather than the Blacks’.” He let his eyes follow comforting paths along the trips and turns and triangles of runes, which in each individual part had never been too complicated. “Me, Ron, Hermione and Kreacher.” Kreacher was set in the centre, the labyrinth’s minotaur. “We added Malfoy a couple of years ago. It’s a bit convoluted,” Harry admitted.

“Right,” Lupin said, sitting down. He looked at Harry askance, and he looked absolutely exhausted.

You did ask, Harry wanted to tell him. He was pretty sure that Lupin had done so.

Instead, he carried on explaining, because it was all at the front of his mind and it was late, so he wasn’t able to assess whether or not it was time to shut up.

Up at Hogwarts, in day-to-day life, Harry spends most of his time ignoring cues from the students that he should shut up, because they’re tired or because they don’t care about vampires or because it’s ten minutes till lunch and they’re hungry. It’s a habit.

“For now,” Harry told Lupin, “I think that I can set up the four of you as complementary to the four of us. So you’ll be allowed in and out, not really because you’re part of the house, but because you’re an exception to the rule of what doesn’t belong. If that makes sense.”

It didn’t make sense, Harry realised, standing by the table.

Lupin blinked, as though he hadn’t been paying attention. “I’m sure that it doesn’t matter whether or not I understand,” he said diplomatically, not at all like a teacher, and it made Harry frown. “As long as the outcome’s there. You’ll act as the key which lets in James…”

“No, no,” Harry interrupted, annoyed, his fingers itching. Lupin looked at him, and Harry wished that he didn’t have to explain. It felt too much like a dodge, the moment he thought about doing so. It was too simple. It couldn’t possibly work. “Ron’s bit’ll make allowance for my dad.”

He reached over beyond the edge of the parchment, picking up the volume on wandlore. It was dog-eared and tatty with use, which Harry was embarrassed by, there in the cool morning. It was covered in the wrapper for Madam Catchlove’s _Charm Your Own Cheese_ , which Harry had no intention of explaining.

“ _Salix alba caerulea,_ ” Harry said, making Lupin blink. He opened the book to the correct page and showed him. “That’s Ron’s wand. Cricket-bat willow.” It was upright, tall and wavy – a bit like Ron, really. There was a sketch. “Dad’s wand’s mahogany. They’re sympathetic. You make stuff out of them.”

Lupin nodded, as though he didn’t trust himself to speak. He likely wanted to call Harry a mad obsessive.

And that would have been fair, considering that Harry had missed a point. “Wands are a shortcut to understanding someone’s magic,” he said, in case Lupin didn’t know. It’s fairly intuitive. Harry’s been hassling Ollivander and Luna about it for years. “It’s not entirely reliable, but nothing’s one-hundred-percent.”

Again, Lupin nodded. “What, ah…” He coughed, covering his mouth with his fist. “What about the rest of us?”

Harry felt his face burn, because this felt like a personal question. “Well,” he said. “I thought I’d put Sirius with Hermione. They’re both fruit-bearing – blackthorn and vine.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Lupin said passingly, flicking through the book for the index of common names. “Keep the gin well away from him, if you want my advice.” He offered this familiarly, making Harry’s nerves prickle as he talked about sloeberries. In the book, Lupin was looking for _prunus spinosa_ , but Harry kept this fact to himself. “What sort of vine’s Hermione’s wand?”

“Oh, I can’t tell you,” Harry said, and Lupin looked up. “She hates it.”

He didn’t look away, the glimmer in his eyes turning wicked.

Harry grinned, feeling manic. It was only because the hour. “It’s chardonnay,” he admitted, amused, because it always makes him laugh.

On the bench, Lupin smirked, looking back down at the book. “Nothing wrong with chardonnay,” he said, clearly suppressing a laugh. “Champagne and Chablis are both chardonnay. Well.” He seemed to get stuck on a point of pedantry. “Blanc de blancs.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Harry agreed, because he’s read something like this in a book, once, or maybe Draco’s said something. The point is, they sell it in every muggle pub, and Hermione much prefers beer or sauvignon blanc. “Don’t tell her I told you.”

Lupin mimed zipping his lips, which made Harry titter, despite himself. The book finally revealed its entry on blackthorn, and Lupin spoke again. “Hawthorn bears fruit as well, of course,” he said idly, not looking up. Harry wondered when he and Draco had spoken about wands. “But I suppose that it would work better with cypress. Death and the route to the underworld,” he described the source of his magic, damning Draco’s with it.

The air changed, it felt; it turned cold; it penetrated Harry’s insides. It was very late. “Maybe,” Harry said shortly, feeling his fingers pull at the parchment on the table. His tone turned blunt and he wasn’t able to find the right lie to soften it. He glanced down at all the shapes. “I think that association’s bollocks.”

Lupin looked up, his expression guarded.

“Both hawthorn and common _salix alba_ can be used as stirring rods for healing potions,” Harry pointed out, referring to his mum’s weeping willow. “They’re both everywhere in the countryside, even if the willow’s not native.” They’re both lovely, he didn’t feel the need to point out.

The trees also both had associations with death, but neither of them belonged inside cemeteries, and Harry wouldn’t be using those links in his runes.

“So that leaves…”

“Yeah, you’re stuck with me,” allowed Harry, crossing his arms and sitting back against the edge of the table. He’d wondered whether this had been a mistake, looking down at his arms, which were pimpled with the night’s air. “We’re _evergreen_ ,” he pointed out, and an hour ago he had believed this to be true. “Holly and cypress.”

This time, Lupin didn’t look up, and he noticeably inhaled.

Seconds later, he put the book down on the table and pressed a fist to his mouth, audibly breathing in and out. Harry swallowed, gradually freezing entirely still, because he realised that he was crying. Professor Lupin. Uncle Moony – which Harry’d been quite good at calling him out loud.

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do, Harry. There he was on a cold, dark Sunday morning, nervous, and someone was crying not two feet away from him. No one had ever told him what he was supposed to do.

It first time he’d got it right with Draco, they’d both had their cocks out. It had solidified the fact that there weren’t any rules, when it was them, and Harry was allowed to do whatever was necessary to make it all stop.

There had to be rules with other people, Harry thought, but he didn’t know what they were.

“We can change things around,” he suggested, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. He glanced back at his sketch, standing up from the table. “I put Sirius and Hermione together to wind them up, mostly. Blackthorn and hawthorn are two sides of the same coin; you and Hermione can be Mediterranean. It’ll make some sort of sense for Mum and me… Or the willows… I’ll need to read the book,” he concluded.

“Don’t be daft,” Lupin told him, not looking up, his voice thick, his breaths long. “You’ll have half written it now. This is fine; it’s an honour.”

He was being sarcastic, Harry thought. “I don’t have to do it at all,” he said shortly.

“There’s symmetry to it,” Lupin said, as though gathering strength. As though he wasn’t lying. He looked up, and his expression was odd. His eyes were red. “Why would you change it?” he demanded, just as short as Harry. “Go on; tell me more about how it all fits together.”

And Harry explained, stilted at first.

“Fascinating,” Lupin said, sitting on the bench, right next to where Harry was standing. He was staring, as though trying to force something to happen, and at some point his eyes stopped being red and returned to pure gold. He kept his arms crossed. “No; keep going.”

As Harry went on, he crossed his legs and was bobbing his foot, hands tucked under his knee. At one point his slippered toe bobbed into Harry’s shin, and it made Harry jump.

Harry cut his explanation short, in the end, and made his excuses, tidied things up. He didn’t feel comfortable, and it didn’t help him sleep, even as he made his way upstairs to find Draco flattened out on his front across the side that wasn’t his side of the bed. Half awake and half in a dream, he shuffled into a forcible embrace as Harry climbed back in. Harry was tense, curled up against him, so it was his fault when Draco woke up.

Less than twelve hours later, they’re in something close to the same position. They’re not in grey, but in scarlet, sitting up and talking, and Harry is finishing the full of this story.

“Oh Harry,” Draco tells him, amused, though he’s hiding something else in his eyes. “This is difficult for me, because part of the problem is clearly that you quite like the look of him.” He sighs, rolling his head to his shoulder with sarcasm. “How can I compete with the father of your son?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Harry tells him, and he fears that he’s blushing. It was Hermione, he tells himself, because he doesn’t remember. Hermione’s the only one of them who’s ever fancied a teacher… And it was Lockhart, not Lupin, wasn’t it?

It doesn’t even matter, Harry thinks. Lupin’s not their teacher anymore, and they’re none of them thirteen.

“And Teddy’s not my _son_ ; how many times…?”

“The question is whether he likes you back,” Draco goes on as though they’re gossiping, deeply sarcastic. “But I’m not sure that that would explain it,” he says, dropping the gossiping tone and moving on calmly. It’s times like these that Draco reminds Harry of Luna, even if he’s the dark side, that muggle LP Sirius used to like. “You’re not slow on the uptake; you’ll have been getting the same impression as me, poor you. He and your godfather are very much –”

This statement makes Harry react with a rush of feeling that he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t like it. He feels foolish somehow. He should have _known._

A smirk touches at the corner of Draco’s mouth. “Do try and be happy for them,” he suggests, as though he’s solved a puzzle.

“Stop needling me; I don’t fancy Moony!” Harry complains, hands in the air. “You are _so_ insecure.”

“And you are very defensive,” Draco accuses, not refuting Harry’s point. His eyes are darkening, as though he can see into Harry’s soul and has just passed the point where anything makes sense.

Merlin, it’s turning Harry on, not to be stuck with it alone. “And stop looking at me!”

“Professor Snape had no idea what he was working with,” Draco comes out with, sitting close and prickling on Harry’s nerves. He’s still looking at Harry, too shrewdly, them both on this rather small bed. “All that confusion,” he says, as though Harry’s been conjured from nowhere. He’s talking nonsense, almost certainly, trying to make some other point. “I could make you the most powerful occlumens.”

“I don’t want to be an occlumens.” Harry is practically lost now, staring into stormy grey eyes, his breath heavy in his nose, all of him tingling.

“None of us do,” Draco says, a reminder that he was never given the choice.

Raising his hand, Harry forces his fingers to be gentle, finding the near-translucent blond stubble coming in around Draco’s jaw. He doesn’t shave every day, because often he’s not in the mood, and his beard hair comes in slowly. He’s been clean-shaven all of this week.

“It’s been an important day today,” Harry lets him hear, aiming to skirt around sympathetic.

“No it hasn’t,” Draco dismisses him anyway, blunt, not looking away, lying to his face. “You’ve not shed a single tear,” he goes on the offensive.

“I’m at work,” Harry finds himself saying easily, glancing down at Godric’s maroon.

“Mm,” agrees Draco, as though they’re both in on a secret. He glances at Harry’s mouth. _Let’s be at play._

“It won’t be any good,” Harry points out, even as he shuffles to kneeling, even as he knows that Draco’s trying to distract him. “I’m all over the place.” These words are accurate, and this really isn’t –

“I like it when you’re all over the place,” Draco points out, telling the truth and it’s startling as he comes closer. His hand smooths around Harry’s elbow, and they’re both wearing heavy robes.

It feels as though Harry has had more sex in the last ten days than he’s had in any ten-day period of his life. And he spent every last weekday at Hogwarts.

There’s something wrong with that, isn’t there? Something desperate.

“I don’t know if anyone’s ever done it in here,” Harry says, feeling off. His blood is thick and pulsing inside him. Draco looks like something that could kill him. “It’d be a bit weird.” He nods over to the side. “An elf might come in for your plate.”

“Oh dear.” Frowning insincerely, Draco skims his other hand up Harry’s leg to make him jump.

Finally, Harry locates the pertinent fact. “If they never moved the bed, then Uncle Moony must have used to sleep here –”

“So?”

“ _Quirrell._ With…”

Draco looks confused, and, right, it’s possible that Harry’s never explained about Quirrell being possessed.

“All the rest of them,” he pleads, and Draco’s practically in his lap. Bardley with his pictures of quidditch teams, he thinks. “Dumbledore when he was our age.” Which makes one of them Grindelwald, or something.

This does it. “Oh – you _bastard_ , Potter,” Malfoy swears. An expression of distaste floods over his face.

He’s pulling back, and Harry feels relieved, even as he also feels alert across every aching inch of himself. He pulls his knees to his chest, breathing

Baleful as he reads Harry’s expression, which must be revealing the state of him, Malfoy smacks the side of Harry’s knees hard with an open hand. The look in his eyes is accusatory.

“Ow.” Harry frowns for effect.

“Don’t fucking _ow_ me! _Morrigan_ ,” Malfoy snaps, looking entirely frustrated, his expression ablaze as he glares at the fireplace. “When are you taking me home and shunting me blind?” he demands, slapping the bed and shifting his knees and turning his glare on Harry.

It makes Harry blink and most of him twitch.

“I’ve had enough of this stupid fucking day and now _you_ ,” Draco doesn’t finish, his glare practically slamming Harry into the bed.

Harry’s in love. He can feel it: a great, wide well of glittering emotion. He always forgets what it feels like until he slips and falls again. “There’s a bash on at George’s.” The words come out of him to wind Draco tighter, even more vivid, and he’s dipping in a toe.

Without hesitation, without a single thought for the way it might come across, Draco makes a face. “Has this war not been remembered enough?” he dares say, talking past Harry to the wardrobe behind him. “The bastard’s dead and we’ve had ten years of mourning. What’s left?”

“Let’s at least get a drink with Luna at the Broomsticks.” Harry wants to be with him where everyone can see. Certain people anyway. People he likes, one or two of them, while he still has the nerve. He squeezes his legs closer to himself, against temptation. “Ollivander’s come all this way.”

“Mm,” accepts Draco, looking down at Harry’s socks and calming down, making Harry wiggle his toes. He’s the most perfect study in angles, draped with black, his face austere. “We’ll locate Ron and Hermione,” he says as though they’re his friends, acquiescing, slipping like silk from the bed, and Harry doesn’t trust himself to speak. “Granger’s been taking it hard.”

“It’s because Ron’s a mess,” Harry manages, and – and he finds himself returning to solemnity. “He’s never cried about Fred. He gets stuck.”

“Yes,” Draco allows, rather wryly. “I can imagine.” He looks up and grins wickedly. “Gryffindor,” he accuses, and it isn’t appropriate. “You’re all so _fake_.”

* * *

Two days before this, on the second of May, Friday night, exactly ten years on from the war, near drowned by marking, all shoved to the end of the week and to Sunday, it’ll have to be, after the memorial – or Monday morning, next week, some point whenever – Harry leaves Hogwarts for number 12, Grimmauld Place.

He’s not supposed to leave Hogwarts. He’s due back on Sunday and the baskets of marking – he hasn’t had a chance to touch them because of duelling club and corridor duty and fifth years worried about their OWLs. Seventh years who’ve heard that he worked as an auror and want to know what it was like.

As usual, Harry’s been telling them that he was never an auror, because this is a matter of record. He hasn’t been telling them about the eighteen months he spent struggling to get out of bed, shadowing Kingsley Shacklebolt, sometimes, as the man tried to coach him into something political. He’s never told any student about scraping his way, not even half-arsed, into gaining three NEWTs and spending days at a time reading up on runes and making puzzle boxes for Kreacher to test. All before he joined the Ministry somewhere quiet and went to the pub with the two blokes from work, who knew everyone in the Leaky and liked to get him drunk (“Your life’s yours to live, Haz – stop worrying!”). Their names were Dan and Gawain.

Dan used to take his glasses away if they’d been out for a while, telling Harry that it would get him more looks, especially if they went somewhere muggle. He’d put them in Harry’s pocket and charm them to stick until the end of the night. Harry used to drink through the headaches, which seems foolish, looking back, but Hermione was never there to point that out to him. Regulus’s room echoed without any of his stuff in it, so Harry liked to be out; it used to make them all laugh when Harry tripped over things.

He imagines saving this story for his speech. A lesson. An anthem for doomed youth, like Ginny’s poem – a ballsy choice, he’ll think on reflection, deploying the wrong word. He admires her for it, he’ll mean.

Harry’s already written something else, from when he was thinking about it. Dumbledore and Snape, the reasons for Voldemort’s downfall. He’s sure that Snape was a hero, though they were never close. He’s sure that Dumbledore used them both, though it was the only way to win, in the end. Harry doesn’t like thinking about it; he’s moved on. It all came to good, so it doesn’t matter, does it? It makes a good story, the tricks that the three of them played on each other, the strength of Snape’s need for a friend (or whatever), Harry’s need for a grandfather, Dumbledore’s need for redemption. It’s a story about the power of love, and that’s enough to banish fear and hatred from this world.

On the second of May, 2008, Friday night, Harry apparates directly to Malfoy’s bedroom from the Hogwarts gates, all in one deep, heady rush where it feels like he’s swallowing himself, and it’ll kill him one day, apparating this far. The headmistress has told him so. Malfoy will likely kill him first, Harry imagines, if he ever finds out that Harry does this not irregularly.

It’s by necessity. “Sirius and my dad used to have these two-way mirrors,” he says, apparating in, turning over his own feet, his eyes stung by the light. It’s rude, he expects, to apparate in without saying good evening to anyone else, even if it’s entirely possible that they’ve already gone to bed.

He’s done it anyway. Ron and Hermione are on the wards at least, Harry tells himself, so they’ll know that he’s back. He can’t feel the others, and like every week since March it makes him doubt that they’re still here. But it’s done. He’s done it now.

Malfoy is exactly where he should be, at least, safe and half buried in the tumult of his duvet, reading a book. As of three o’clock this afternoon it was all that Harry could think about, even before the world tasted of honey. The sight fills him with relief.

“Mother used to have a crup-cross called Barnabas.” He’s already finishing his paragraph, Malfoy – Harry can see. He’s casting his eye to the page number.

It’s a subtle thing, Malfoy’s affection. “Did she actually?” Harry asks, wanting his voice, throwing his outer robe to the chair in the corner and kicking off his shoes – which are trainers, but they’re black, so they’re basically the same as proper shoes and no one at school has never noticed.

“Who’s to say?” comes the vaguest reply, offered equanimously as Malfoy sets his book on the bedside table. “What the fuck are you on about, Potter?” he asks more shortly, looking up before his gaze trails to where Harry’s unfastening his main robe. Always so subtle, Harry thinks, giddy from his apparition. “Mirrors?” Malfoy goes on, as though the word isn’t a word and Harry is an idiot.

His gaze is sharp, nonetheless. The combination has long done a funny thing to Harry’s insides. “Yeah, mirrors,” he says, not trying to be obtuse. It comes easily. “Two-way mirrors. Like a less glitchy version of that thing Hermione uses to talk to her parents.”

Malfoy’s eyes flash with understanding, and Harry feels short of breath.

He says nothing about this, though, sticking his wand between his teeth and pulling his robe over his head, chucking that in the corner too. “I think that we should make a pair,” he says, wand back in hand, now only dressed in his pants and his t-shirt and his socks. “Big ones, to go on the wall, so we can chat in the evenings.”

He casts _Accio_ to the bathroom, summoning his toothbrush and toothpaste, enjoying Malfoy’s look of fascinated revulsion as he sorts it all out, sitting down on the end of the bed, which is the bounciest that Harry’s ever known. He shoves the toothbrush in his mouth and banishes the toothpaste back.

Malfoy’s lap is covered by the duvet, but he does something squirrelly with his knees as Harry cleans his teeth right in front of him, _here_ , in the _bedroom_.

It’s perfect, just like Harry imagined. He tries not to laugh.

“This is a terrible idea,” Malfoy declares, the light in his eyes promising that part of him thinks the opposite. “It’s only going to end with us wanking.”

Harry’s not about to let Malfoy embarrass him with the word _wanking_. “So?” he asks through his toothpaste, shrugging.

“ _Sho?_ ” Malfoy demands, quoting him the way that he likes to, the dickhead. “ _So,_ ” he repeats, arch and posh, “there we are in your rooms, cocks out – you in reality and me on the wall – and in walks Professor Longbottom, wondering why you aren’t at duelling.”

Harry laughs. He can’t help himself. The idea surprises him, and he may or may not have once seen Neville getting a handjob behind a nightclub (“Harry! Get away, you bastard!”), so it would be decent revenge for them both.

His mouth is full of froth, because he’s still brushing his teeth, and as it starts spluttering out of him Harry decides that what he’s managed so far will have to do. Bouncing to his feet, he dashes to the pristine grey-and-white en suite and spits the froth into the sink, running the tap to wash the brush and clean his chin.

“I have wards,” Harry insists, calling through while he rubs his face with a fluffy Malfoy towel. It smells better than the ones downstairs. Kreacher adores Mr Malfoy – and his skin will put up with scented washing powder, unlike Ron’s. “Nev’d be too busy doing crowd control. Cursing my name.”

Malfoy has climbed out of bed in these few seconds, Harry discovers when he returns. It’s somewhat counterproductive for Harry’s plans, but Harry finds himself grinning anyway. Here he is, Draco Malfoy, all knobbly knees and tight longjohn shorts packing away an invitingly rotund set of bits, pointy elbows, black t-shirt and his pointy face, razor-edged and monochrome, still here after a week.

His eyes are dark and consuming. “Hello darling,” he says lowly, like a threat, transforming the conversation from what it was before.

In an instant, Harry is afire with adrenaline. His fingers are tingling, exactly like it was back in school.

Also _never, never, never_ like it was in school. This might be important.

They meet somewhere useless at the edge of the rug, but Draco’s burying his hands in Harry’s hair, making everything tingle. He kisses the way that he does, as though it hurts him but he’s doing it anyway. Harry’s eyes are closing and his breath is hot, everything bright inside him and his hands moving on their own, trying to control what even now feels like some sort of torrid violence pumping out of Draco’s heart, screaming from his bones.

Harry feels like liquid in these moments, like he’s trying to put out fires and close wounds. Heavy, liquid, slow. He doesn’t feel like himself, and certainly not the way he always felt when people used to corner him, make him talk and dance and laugh even when nothing was funny. He feels like he knows what he’s doing.

He used to find it disturbing. Also, always, a turn-on.

“You like the idea, then?” Harry asks now, his own voice gone low and rough as he walks Draco back to his bed. It’s difficult to walk; more like tripping. “You want me here, saying goodnight?”

“You were talking about wanking,” is all Draco says, his expression incredulous, his fingers tender and prickling, his lips and cheeks flush like a doll’s.

Everything about him’s contradiction. “You’re such a liar,” Harry tells him. Emotion pulls in his stomach like a portkey hook. “You’re in love with me, aren’t you?” he accuses the cold, flat eyes he’s looking into.

Draco bounces as he falls back onto the mattress. “Fuck off,” is his reply, but he’s gone entirely pink and Harry imagines that he might say it later.

He goes for Harry’s bum, as it is, one hand groping up the back of his boxers, the other skimming to his shoulder. “You’re insatiable,” Harry comes out with, allowing himself to be pulled closer. “You’ve been thinking about me all week.”

“Never,” Draco says, even as he climbs to sit across Harry’s hips and twitches Harry’s glasses from his face. There’s a wand in Harry’s hand, even now, forgotten and holly, and Draco plucks that from him too. He sets both accessories on his own bedside table, well within reach. He pulls off Harry’s t-shirt and trails a hand through the hair that errantly litters Harry’s chest, fingers running low.

Then he’s looking up, sitting close, just looking, tracing his fingers over the naked skin around Harry’s eyes, all while Harry blinks at his softened, blurry-edged features. Half-blind, Harry still somehow trusts Draco not to trip him up, when he’s looking at him.

Draco’s eyes are hard and pale like stone, like the sky at dawn, blue-grey-white, the weather ever changing, the colour of everything new. Caught up in the moment, the day that this is, Harry finds it difficult to breathe. He can feel the movement of lungs in his chest.

“Hello,” Draco promises again, more gently, his expression wry and piercing.

Harry has a horrible feeling as if he’s going to cry. Draco always does this; he insists on shifting the world around them. “Hello,” says Harry carefully.

Draco’s not going to ask how Harry feels about today, Harry’s certain. It’s not as if Harry knows what he’s feeling to answer him. There are no bad days without Voldemort, only important ones. So he surely doesn’t feel bad, does he now?

“I missed you,” is all that Harry tells him, quite truthfully. He makes the effort to grin, but it doesn’t last. “Bit embarrassing,” he has to add as he hears himself.

Draco’s gaze drops to his mouth, rises to his hairline, assesses every inch of him. He swirls his fingers into the hair behind Harry’s ear as though he loves it, the mess of it, the smutty touches of grey, and Harry can’t hold back a jitter. “Make that _extremely_ ,” Draco agrees, his own hair flopping at his temple.

He’s nothing but a flood of feelings, Harry, he thinks, as another swell crashes over him. For so long now, it’s been the case, like he’s still working through eighteen years of them.

“Two sets,” Draco tells him, and with a leap in his throat Harry realises that this is an agreement to the mirror proposal.

They might even make them for real, Harry thinks – though two sets would be overly complicated. Draco makes everything complicated.

“One for the office –” Draco’s going on, and it’s an invitation, at least, to wrench _his_ t-shirt over his head, to reveal the lines of his shoulders. “One for the bedroom!” Draco protests, his voice more emphatic as it’s muffled, as he shuffles his arms free. His hair fluffs up in the t-shirt’s wake. He frowns at Harry afterwards as though he’s misbehaved, tearing the thing from his elbows. “You don’t sleep with that wretched dragon creature, do you?”

He means Puff. Harry has the perfect line. “Not that one.”

It takes a moment to land. Harry waits as Draco stills, bites his lip as Draco’s expression glows bright and then brighter, pure in outrage.

Then Harry snickers and he’s being attacked – wrestled down to the bed. His neck is being sucked on until it makes him whimper. There’s lots more of this; much too much of it –

“This isn’t –” Harry tries to complain, clawing at hair and the duvet as Draco insists on sinking further down, sucking the flesh of Harry’s stomach into his mouth. This isn’t what the mirrors would be for, he can’t say.

“I know how your mind works.”

Draco says it with a rumble low in his throat, pulling at Harry’s shorts, which Harry kicks off. He’s only joking, but Harry’s legs are trying to embrace him anyway, the bones of him. The first touch of his mouth is shallow and polite where Harry wants it, a solid press of his tongue, and Harry can’t keep having a conversation at this point, eyes shut, his hands clawing.

“ _Why?_ Why would you –”

It takes someone sucking approximately once. Maybe twice. Something like that. Harry doesn’t count, all of him tense as his body betrays him.

“You’re such a cheap date,” Malfoy jokes when it's done, sounding fond even as Harry feels something bitter and sad, his pulse slowing and his vision clearing from light. Harry’s knee has pulled up with the tension, the other one scraping down the bed, and Malfoy snuggles into the crook of it. He’s amused to have Harry’s cock rise against his nose, always, and it will happen in moments. He’ll likely insist on having another go.

Harry can only see the top of his head, blurry bone blond. He feels cold.

“Draco, please don’t stay down there,” Harry finds himself asking, reaching for him.

There must be something in his voice, because Draco looks up, his hair rumpling against Harry’s leg, his head a weight. His eyes flick to Harry’s and he apologises, frowning. “Sorry.”

Harry shakes his head, because he’s done nothing wrong. “I can’t see your face,” he insists, because his eyesight’s very poor.

Crawling up to where he started, Draco slumps over Harry’s chest, face in his, oddly playful, his cock hard. “This any better?” he jeers, looming.

“It’s all right,” Harry decides, wrapping him up in his arms, all of him present and close. “Though I think there’s jizz in your hair,” he says as he kisses the skin behind his ear, as Draco swears and gets their hands tangled up. And it’s more than enough, really, Harry tells himself, ten years after everything.


	4. A summer holiday, part 1

Summer begins eight weeks later, at the end of June. The day after returning from Hogwarts, Harry wakes to find Draco lying in the hazy half-light of the morning. He looks exhausted, like he couldn’t move, but his eyes are open, bleary, tracking Harry’s face and hands.

Harry’s throat is too raw to speak, his heart thudding in his chest. He rolls to the edge of the bed, reaching for his glasses.

Not much has changed, since May. Harry still wakes up surprised to find that he’s not alone in bed – that he doesn’t have to leave – and he thinks of himself as an orphan sometimes, when this isn’t strictly true. It makes sense, he supposes, though he doesn’t understand it: the end of the year is always busy at school, and between late Friday nights and seeing Teddy, Sunday laziness, there’s been little time to take in the changes to his world.

“You’ve never told me that you suffer from nightmares,” says Draco, today. Tucked up in grey, he’s little more than a pale, blond head. His voice is all gravel.

Harry shrugs, rubbing his exposed arm free of goosebumps and taking up his wand to conjure fresh water into the glass on the nightstand.

It’s the summer, Harry tells himself, resolutely picking up the glass, his nerves tingling from Draco’s presence in the bed. There’s time now.

“How long has this been going on?” Draco asks about the nightmares.

Harry shakes his head. It’s been a while, he supposes, but it’s not unexpected. This time of year, when the heat starts to settle, he’s usually dreaming about Cedric or Sirius, one thing or the other. This morning it was the other. “I’ve always had nightmares,” he explains, his throat tight, which makes him cough. “Everyone has nightmares,” he manages, before taking another swallow of cold.

“No.” Draco’s disagreeing with him, watching, no matter that he clearly isn’t speaking from experience. His eyes are dark and shadowed where he’s buried in the bed, though more of him is visible now that Harry’s sat up. Harry imagines that he hasn’t slept in at least twenty-four, maybe thirty-six hours, and who knew when before that. They went out last night, and Draco came straight from the Department of Mysteries. “They’re rare among adults.”

“It’s weird, you watching me sleep,” Harry tells him. He wants to change the subject. He didn’t think that someone watching would be able to tell, these days. He doesn’t shout or cry.

Draco ignores this accusation, turning onto his back. The grey duvet barely shifts; it relaxes like a body of water across his black t-shirt. He looks about as weak as a kitten, or something more sly. “I didn’t know,” he says tiredly. “I suppose…” He looks thoughtful, maybe embarrassed, maybe losing his thread, glancing off to the room’s corner. Harry finds himself softening with affection, to see it. “I tend to nod off,” he reflects, “when you’re here.”

“Yeah,” Harry agrees, looking down at the grey around them, glass in his hand.

It was only a matter of time, he supposes. What Draco’s saying has long been true for him as well. He doesn’t know how to explain it, that in the last four years he’s found Draco a good way to avoid bad dreams. Getting off with him, but also not. He used to have quidditch to tire himself out with, but he doesn’t play quidditch anymore.

“Sometimes I dream that I leave you in the fire,” Harry admits, drinking water, and he’s not sure why he does it. This isn’t what he dreamt about last night.

Draco nudges his head to a turn on the pillow, just enough to look at him. “You didn’t leave me in the fire,” he says softly, sounding confused.

“I know,” replies Harry. He’s not sure how to explain. It felt straightforward in the moment to save Malfoy and Goyle and get the diadem anyway, but he wonders, sometimes, what he’d have done if there’d been a starker choice. He imagines Malfoy and Goyle on a pile of broken furniture, the diadem glinting on another far away, Ron and Hermione not there and the fire bearing down. He’s certain that he knows what he’d do, at seventeen. He’s a seeker, and in his mind’s eye he can see the diadem glint.

Harry shakes his head, swallowing water, then puts his wand and his glass back down on the bedside table, shuffling over and shifting the bedclothes into lumps and waves.

“Let me try and knock you out,” Harry suggests, abandoning his thoughts to frame Draco’s head with his arm. He rolls over him as gently as possible, worried about breaking his bones.

“Mm,” Draco doesn’t complain, clearly not willing to move. His eyes lock onto Harry’s, his pupils wide and slightly unfocused. He doesn’t seem well, when he’s not had enough sleep. Too thin. Harry makes plans to see him knocked out and then to sit with him, later, for three hours if necessary, while he eats a meal with meat and two veg, maybe steak’n’kidney pie.

“You should’ve woken me up,” chides Harry for now, not taking it personally when everything he palms feels cool and uninterested.

“What good would that have done?” asks Draco vaguely. “Oh,” he adds softly, and Harry can feel what he’s reacting to, now digging under his clothes.

“Dunno,” Harry tells him. It’s not his job to think of these things. “Anything would have been better than –”

Draco gasps, and Harry’s cock is interested in this. "Mm," he repeats, shutting his eyes.

“There you are,” Harry encourages, clicking his fingers for the neat little spell Draco taught him long ago and laying it on thick. He’s never had much call for wandless magic – it feels like his phoenix wand is ever there when he needs it – but he makes an exception for this.

“You snored,” Draco tells him now, judgemental, as if they’re in a conversation. He breathes in a huff, and the last of his energy is coiling, focused, visible on his face. “You’re very warm,” comes the next complaint as Harry kisses him, hooked over his side. Harry kisses him again and it’s full of a sour, earthy grunt, which is perfect, demanding. “You taste – beer.”

“Not _beer_ ,” Harry mocks him, a snigger in his nose as Draco whines, working a heel into the bed, shifting so that Harry’s hand has more room between them. He speeds up.

“Fuck,” Draco states in the end, as though something’s been stolen from him, his words spat breath as Harry feels him seize, shudder, not quite – “Fucking bastard – _fuck_ –”

As he comes, Harry wants to apologise – but he also thinks that Draco might be falling asleep. He slumps into his own mess and Harry’s forced to let him go. He’s frowning, Draco, breathing harshly into the back of his own hand and the pillow, keening a little, shivering once. His eyes are crunched closed. His breathing levels out as Harry keeps a hand on his spine, under his t-shirt; he shifts; his eyelids relax and he can’t seem to open them.

With a kiss to the soft skin behind Draco’s ear, eventually, holding his face there for a moment, Harry rolls free of the bed to clean them both up and tuck in Draco with the oversized hand-towel bear from earlier in the year. He charms it to smell a little like lager and a little like Hermione’s night-time tea. The routine is infantilising, Harry supposes, but it was never done for him, and Draco is soon holding the bear loosely, curling up over its bulk.

It’s NEWT-level Charms, adding smells, so there, it’s for grown-ups.

“Nm?” Draco asks in his sleep, frowning, the sound rattling as he curls up more tightly. He’s already in a nightmare most likely, if that’s how it works, or trying to wake up.

The question’s familiar. It’s one of many that Draco asks in his sleep. They’ve been breaking Harry’s heart for four years, because he never knows the answer.

More often than not, Harry’s sure that he couldn’t say when he fell in love with Malfoy. Watching him now, fiddling with the charms, trying to find the right combination, Harry thinks that it must have been on that first dark day they got together. It won’t have been the sex, though that was something in itself. Malfoy fell asleep in Harry’s arms, his old enemy, unconscious and vulnerable for five solid minutes before Harry joined him – and people had held Harry before, but that sleep, at the start of things, was the longest that Harry’d ever held anyone who wasn’t a baby, since Cedric’s corpse and Dumbledore’s and Dobby’s. It was like they’d become different people.

There’s at least one other option, nonetheless, which maybe allowed for the sex and sleep to happen. Sometimes, though he tries not to think about it, Harry's convinced that he fell in love with Malfoy in that bright, frightening minute when he told Harry plainly to fly towards the _door_ , because everything was burning.

He's not sure what this means. Watching for few moments more, Harry fiddles with the charms until Draco settles, steels himself, steals clothes with his wand and steals away on his feet, moving silently, and he shuts off the bedroom with a spell of protecting quiet.

* * *

Showering downstairs, Harry greets the day by drawing the drawing-room curtains. He’s brushing his teeth. He got off in the shower, and as usual it was little more than a full-bodied sneeze, leaving him feeling tingly and weak and worried about the potency of his Scouring Charm.

If he knew who to ask, he would ask someone what was wrong with him, because it’s been like this for years. He’s only ever got as far as looking up _hyperarousal_ , which didn’t mean what he thought that it might.

Anyway, it can’t be much later than eight, Harry thinks, looking out of the window.

Down below, as the morning begins, as the summer does, Harry’s eyes catch on a figure looking up from the pavement. She’s standing opposite the house, over the road by the railings of the garden square – Local Residents Only, No Ball Games, No Dogs, a lawn and trees and a pond inside a path. She’s blonde, her hair cut in some sort of glossy professional bob. Her outfit is pastel pink and emerald green, and there’s a large handbag hooked on her shoulder. The green makes her look like a witch.

Number 12, Grimmauld Place is unplottable, Harry always has to remind himself. Hermione keeps a secret on top of this, that number 12 lies between numbers 11 and 13. Knowing the address is not enough to find the house; people whom Kreacher lets through the floo can visit without ever being told this crucial piece of information.

There used to be regular visitors to the square, in the early years – a combination of press and people wanting to say thanks – but every one of them ended up frustrated and confused and in the end they stopped coming. Harry watched them bicker from inside the parlour, from here in the drawing room, a spider or two keeping him company as he sat on the floor in the shadows.

She shouldn’t be able to find the house, this figure, but it feels to Harry, in the prickling suspicion on the back of his neck, that she’s looking for it. She twitches her glasses, looking, and she’s a blast from the past, in more ways than one. She’s Rita Skeeter, Harry is certain, and she’s come for him again.

He vanishes the toothpaste froth in his mouth and his toothbrush, wincing as the extra plaque is stripped from his teeth. One of his gums bleeds.

One day he’ll listen when Hermione talks about floss, he tells himself, but for now this doesn’t matter – he dashes downstairs, skimming the edges of the treads, hoping that there’s at least _someone_ he can warn.

As it is, everywhere seems conspicuously empty. The house runs quiet with all the sound-proofing, but Harry swings around doorframes quite certain that he cannot be the only one up. It’s Friday, because of the odd days that term ends, and Ron and Hermione will be going into the Ministry soon, but they’re both still around somewhere for now.

There’s a window left open in the ground floor’s formal dining room, and it’s here that Harry hears voices.

Harry enters the room only meaning to pull the window closed. With the protections on the house, it hardly matters, leaving windows open – but it’s the sort of thing that Harry knows Kreacher will blame himself for. It will spur him to insist – as he has started to insist with worrying frequency – that one of them should take a sword to his neck before he embarrasses them with the wrong guest. Kreacher tends to be embarrassed that _they_ aren’t embarrassed by the prospect of such terrible embarrassment, and by this point it’s spiralled into the absurd, Harry thinks, because it’s only that Kreacher’s popped up the wrong plates, when he shouldn’t have to pop plates at all.

It’s for this reason – and for this reason alone, he tells himself – that Harry enters the dark dining room, approaches the window and takes in the sight of his godfather and Lupin finishing their breakfast outside, both facing the garden with their feet up on chairs, tubular and red.

Harry’s been trying not to act weird around Lupin. Sirius and Lupin. Lupin and Sirius. If they’ve got back together, they’ve not made a thing of it, so whatever.

It’s – somewhat easier to watch them through a window.

It’s the end of June, but Harry feels a breeze and imagines that it must be fresh outside with it. Pleasant. Both men are wearing dressing gowns. Lupin is properly clothed in tartan and slippers, while Sirius is barefoot and wearing jeans as pyjamas, which Harry doesn’t think about. The maroon quilted thing that should be tied across his bare chest is somewhat coming loose, but he looks boyish to Harry in this disarray. He’s terribly handsome, more than he ever was after Azkaban, but that's only a curiosity. Lupin’s much more Harry’s type. If it could be said that he has one.

Lupin is smoking a cigarette, and Harry still means to buy Draco that pint. The smell is acrid here, near the window. There’s an odd sort of tall metal teapot, maybe, on the red table, an empty rack for toast and a jar of jam and used plates. Other things; a newspaper?

Harry means to call out to them – he knows that he should – but Lupin’s tone is low and scathing and angry, and Harry hesitates to interrupt.

“… all for nothing –”

Sirius sighs, a long, worn sort of sound. “Moony,” he says, and Lupin grunts. “Moony,” he tries again. “Remus. _John_ , babe,” he addresses him, frustrated, and it makes Harry stall. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

Lupin stalls too. He turns his head, outside. “Since when am I _John?_ ” he demands, the _babe_ not commented on.

Shrinking to the shadows, Harry doesn’t know how to leave.

“You let me call you John,” dismisses Sirius, presumably lying. “I was there when you changed your CV.” This might be the truth.

“Was it that long ago?” Lupin asks absently, as though surprised to hear it. He puts the cigarette back in his mouth.

Sirius seems to ignore this. “What’d you ever do with that type-machine I fixed?” he comes out with, and Harry guesses that he means a typewriter.

“Stripped it and sold it,” Lupin says without looking, spiteful. “What did you expect?”

A shrug, dismissing Lupin’s tone. “Something more dramatic, I suppose. And of course it was that long ago,” Sirius goes on. “You only had to do the rounds once.” He puts on a squeaky voice, pushing. “ _Remus? What’s that? Is that Irish? Mr Smithson don’t want no Irish._ ” A smirk pulls at his mouth. _Muggles,_ is the clear implication, with complicated irony, but it gets no response. Sirius twitches his head, looking to the garden. It’s as though his thoughts move on, rambling. “The Blacks were Irish originally, you know.”

There’s tension in Lupin’s expression, in his fingers. “It’s a ridiculous name,” he says, on a delay. “I don’t know why my father –”

“I know, babe,” Sirius interrupts, saying it _again_. “I do listen when you talk.”

“That’s a new one on me,” Lupin tells him, a tick in his jaw as he takes another drag on his cigarette. His slipper twitches. “And don’t call me _babe_ ,” he snaps witheringly, at last. Harry breathes out. “It doesn’t make you sound clever, it doesn’t make you sound cool, and it doesn’t make you sound transgressive.”

A broad grin steals across Sirius’ face at this reaction, and he sits up in his chair, tipping it onto its rear legs while he rests a loose hand on the table. “On the contrary, my dear Moony. _Babe_ ,” he adds, incredibly pleased with himself and incredibly posh and oddly gushing as Lupin scowls. “It reveals me to be all of these things, and you should be honoured to have me so recognise you.”

“Honoured?” Lupin throws back, clearly set off, a puff of smoke escaping him as punctuation.

He’s watching his godfather and Professor Lupin flirting, Harry realises. This is what Sirius looks like out on the pull – not cocky or suave but an over-eager mess.

Lupin – may be into it. He also may not be. Harry can’t tell. They seem to have reversed roles from the weekend after Sirius’s return, and Harry doesn’t know when this happened.

There’s a child in Harry’s head who wants to run, or maybe shout. The rest of him can only stare.

“Honoured,” Sirius is insisting, his eyes bright and his mouth twitching because he clearly wants to laugh. “Excited. _Intrigued._ ” He thinks he’s so funny. His voice dips low as he tips his chair forward. “A little bit frightened and a little bit turned on.”

The moment holds for one cringe-worthy second before Lupin breaks out into an obscene snort of laughter, which makes Harry blink and look up from the floorboards. Draco owes _him_ a pint, Harry thinks, because he’s never mentioned this. Lupin is shaking his head, chin to his chest, all while Sirius equally collapses into sniggers. “You stupid dog,” accuses Lupin fondly, and they really could have just been friends.

Harry would have left at this point – he would have done – if a _pop_ of apparition hadn’t sounded through the garden and put both Lupin and Sirius back on alert.

It’s their third, out of breath from a run, apparently, and showing it off

(“I don’t like the thought of you out in the forest, not without anyone with you,” Hagrid has been telling Harry for years. He’s the only one who knows that Harry runs.

Harry’s always shrugged. “I’ve got my wand with me,” he points out, letting Hagrid assume that he runs with a light. He far prefers to let his eyes adjust, to feel it as the night becomes dawn.).

“Morning,” James says once he’s stretched, bouncing on his toes. He’s taking in the mess of the table, presumably searching for a cup of cold tea.

“ _Mor_ ning,” echoes Sirius, back on the rear legs of his chair.

James gives him a look, breathing hard, glancing down at the decking. Sirius tuts, bringing the chair’s front legs to the wood with a _thunk._

“Pleasant jog?” suggests Lupin, sounding scathing as dark curses. He’s still smoking, his slippered feet up in front of him and crossed at the ankles.

“Got me going for the day,” replies James, obnoxiously cheery. Without any heat, he adds derisively to both of them, “Pleasant time being layabouts?”

“Smashing,” Sirius mocks him, showing his teeth.

Lupin blows smoke at James’s face, making him wrinkle his nose.

“You know that Harry’s back from today,” James points out unnecessarily. “It’s the holidays.”

He comes over to the table and steps inside the chair which Sirius earlier had his feet on. He taps his thumb to the metal table, still holding his wand, and as though answering his thoughts there’s a teapot suddenly in front of him, then a teacup and saucer in matching snake-ridden chintz. A miniature milk jug wobbles with what must be a refill, perched by the side of the metal not-a-teapot. A tall glass of water comes too, and James reaches for this first, drinking half of it before sitting down.

Sirius looks at Lupin, and apparently they’re in conspiracy. “Have a coffee, James,” he suggests. “Go wild.”

“Coffee makes you utterly unbearable,” is all that James says. It’s not clear whether he means when Sirius drinks it, or himself.

In any case, Harry guesses that this is what the not-a-teapot makes. It doesn’t look like the coffee pot that Draco uses, which Kreacher supplies in a bigger version for breakfast downstairs – a _cafetière_ , as Aunt Petunia always made certain to say.

In response to James, of course, Sirius laughs, and the sound fills the garden.

Harry’s not sure why he isn’t moving. It may be the askance, acidic way that Lupin is looking at James. Harry remembers their reunion; it doesn’t make sense. But then Harry’s been gone quite a lot, so maybe James…

“Anyone would think,” says Sirius to James, apparently immune to the tension, “that you were _ashamed_ of me.”

James sighs, sparing a glance at Sirius’s chest, which is essentially exposed to the air. “I can hardly take you out like that,” he says, and it’s somehow a joke. He’s pouring himself a cup of tea, which he almost certainly won’t drink. “You’re barely decent. My wife won’t stop telling me about the state of the plughole. It’s been putting her off.”

Sirius smirks, and as a precaution, instinctively, Harry finds himself covering his ears and shutting his eyes.

When he dares listen again, Sirius is saying something else. “You know how it goes,” he’s concluding, long-suffering. “Some of us are born to be strapping and manly…”

Now seems to be the moment when Lupin’s had enough. “And some of us are born to be Sirius Black,” he says. His tone is idle and dangerous, to Harry’s ears. It’s like a command to stop flirting, but that isn’t quite right.

James simply laughs, as though this is normal conversation. “Moony, you traitor!” he mocks, using all the wrong words.

Sirius is looking at Lupin. “That was uncalled for,” he says, his eyes narrow and his tone very strange.

“Was it?” Lupin asks airily.

The look between them is heavy, and neither of them is flirting the way that they were flirting before, but now, if it wasn’t so quiet – now, _now_ Harry would leave.

Though it’s nice, Harry tells himself. It’s nice that they have each other.

“Yes, yes, I am still here,” James interrupts, with no similar compunction, or else as though he’s used to it. “Do save it for the bedroom, why don’t you?”

The atmosphere chills. Harry’s face grows hot, and he thinks that it must be with embarrassment.

On the decking, Lupin sits up straight, kicking his feet down from the spare chair, and he stabs out his cigarette in an ashtray which Harry didn’t notice was there. “Maybe you should mind your own business, dear Prongs.”

“We live in the same house,” James challenges him, his expression hard behind his glasses. “And – sorry,” he doesn’t apologise, as though this argument has been going on for longer than the last five minutes, “but I was there when you discovered the old todge between your legs and I was there when you discovered each other’s, so I don’t _quite_ understand on what grounds –”

Lupin doesn’t raise his voice, but the words are clear. “I don’t need fucking grounds to fucking tell you to fuck off –”

Harry imagines he’s going to do something that’ll get him caught if he stays listening much longer. He’s in shadow; he peels away carefully towards the dining-room door, leaving the window.

“Moony, he’s only –”

“And I suppose that _you’ve_ been reporting –”

“He has done nothing of the kind!”

“What are you scared of me telling him?”

“I’m not scared of you telling him anything,” says Lupin, cold, and it makes no sense, because Lupin was the one who gave out chocolate. “There is very little that you know.”

Harry winces on his godfather’s behalf.

“Well. Now you’ve hurt my feelings.” Sirius seems oddly unconcerned, his tone more puzzled than hurt to Harry’s ears, and Harry’s not sure that he understands it either.

* * *

Rita Skeeter, Harry remembers, once he’s returned to the hall. Right.

He dithers for a moment, his hand resting on the newel post at the top of the stairs down to the breakfast room, not sure what to do.

He makes the choice to plunge in anyway, inevitably, and heads through into the conservatory, ducking his chin and scratching at the crown of his head as though he’s deep in thought, very deep, raking his hair to try and flatten it at the front.

By the time that he opens the conservatory door, looking up, he finds himself walking into a completely different breakfast. Three old friends are sitting together on the terrace, amiable around the remains of their toast. Harry’s dad is refilling Sirius and Lupin’s cups of tea.

Sirius’ chest is still on display, but cut with slightly less sloppy swathes of maroon. Lupin’s cigarette and ashtray have vanished. Harry doesn’t know at all when the transformation happened.

It’s such a lie.

“Harry!” Sirius is the one to greet him as he shuts the glass doors behind him. “Good _morning_ , Professor Potter,” he says warmly, his eyes dancing. It makes Harry feel daft. “Enjoying the summer?”

“It’s been all right so far,” Harry tells him, glancing between the three of them, and they’re too vivid to exist, really, surely, looking at him. Maybe that’s what it is. “I need to tell you –”

“Sit down,” his dad tells him, eyes alight, dragging out the back of the chair which Lupin was just using for his feet. It’s unnerving.

As for Lupin himself, his expression is warm and concerned. He looks almost odd, without his cigarette. He’s holding the edge of his chair, either side of his legs. “Have you had any breakfast?” he asks, being helpful. They haven’t spoken, really, since the beginning of May, for two months – they’ve talked around Teddy. Harry’s only been back for weekends. “We’ve finished the toast, but I suppose…”

“No, no – don’t…”

When Harry sits down, awfully, a plate immediately appears in front of him, steaming with two slices of toast covered in something rich and vegetarian, tomatoes and onions and chickpeas, a poached egg resting on top of this.

Cutlery appears next. A glass of pumpkin juice. A cup for tea from the teapot. It smells amazing, this breakfast – vegetables and pepper.

“Oh,” he finds himself saying, looking at it. “Thanks, Kreacher.”

His stomach tells him that he’s hungry, so Harry starts to eat. For a moment no one says anything, and the three of them are looking at him the way that Harry thinks he should be looking at them.

“Someone’s popular,” Sirius manages first, clearing his throat and giving Lupin a look. There are so many looks; it’s ridiculous. Harry doesn’t know how to read them.

Lupin scowls sharply, and Harry almost doesn’t catch it.

“Looks tasty,” agrees Harry’s dad. He sounds sceptical, confused as to why this breakfast isn’t a fry-up.

Harry reacts, nearly flinching. “I happened to mention to Kreacher…” he explains, quickly swallowing his mouthful, all rich brown toast and tomato. “I think that Hogwarts serves too much meat.” He doesn’t know why he has to explain; he rolls his eyes. “Kreacher likes to outdo the school elves.”

“No need to be embarrassed,” says Sirius, laughing at him.

Harry grits his teeth, because he _isn’t_ embarrassed. He cuts up another bite.

“It’s useful to know that he burns our toast on purpose,” Sirius says idly, letting the end of this hang.

“He doesn’t burn _mine_ ,” Harry’s dad points out passingly.

Harry feels a warm, bright surge of irritation. “You’re not thinking about getting back at him,” he tells Sirius. “Not for toast.”

“Why would we ever do that?” Lupin offers mildly, picking up his teacup.

Harry turns his glare on him. Lupin looks away, chastened, and his dad coughs into his fist.

Sirius’s expression is unyielding. “He would have seen you killed, Harry,” he points out, sounding as though he’s been brooding on this for weeks. “You don’t get to be killed.”

“What are you…?” Harry glances at his dad, who looks wide-eyed with false innocence, which is annoying. He turns back to Sirius. “This is ridiculous,” he points out.

Lupin’s watching him, and he doesn’t seem to agree.

Harry wants them all to shut up and stop talking about this.

“All of that ended ten years ago,” he says no matter what. “Bellatrix and Narcissa are dead. Half the country’s dead. It’s over. Just leave it.” He might not trust Kreacher, but the elf looks after them and he looks after the house. Harry won't see him hurt.

Still looking down, Harry bites, chews and swallows. He should be doing better than this, he thinks, given the adjustment to the wards. He can feel all four of them faintly, when they’re home, as though they’re really here. He feels his dad in his feet and his mum in his hands, Sirius in his throat and Lupin in his teeth, weird though that is. He feels a little like the tingle of stripped plaque.

Then – Harry feels stupid.

“Oh, and Rita Skeeter’s snooping around,” he finally manages to say, concentrating on what’s important.

“Who?” asks his dad, before taking a glug of cold tea.

Harry grips his knife in his fist.

“ _Daily Prophet_ journalist,” Lupin offers, as though he’s being helpful.

“She mostly writes books now,” Harry has to say. They all look surprised. He rolls his eyes. “The last one was about how me and Neville spent sixth and seventh year sleeping with half of Gryffindor Tower.”

 _Professors of Prophecy_ it was called. It didn’t explicitly sell itself as a sex romp – it was supposed to be about whether Voldemort’s choice made Harry special, or if there was something about him himself; if Neville was useless or if he could have been the hero instead. Harry can’t remember what the conclusion was, though he remembers an impression that the introduction was a load of trick questions and dichotomies that didn’t make sense.

Neville used to say that it was a laugh. He and Ginny would act out the chapter on their torrid affair, at which point Luna would end up playing Harry with conjured glasses and a scowl (“How could you do this, Ginevra?”), until one day she abruptly declared that she wouldn’t anymore, and Harry thinks that he knows why.

It came out in 2004, just in time for Christmas when Harry was back in fashion. His OWL classes quoted it behind his back, while the seventh years wanted more details (“Got around, didn’t you, sir?”). He spent three weeks overseeing detentions for students he heard calling Hermione frigid and Ginny a slag, which was how he gained his reputation as a teacher who’s up for fun, but only so much, and they have to know the line. The kids seem to make sense of this more easily than the idea that something’s wrong with what they’re saying. 

“Oh,” says Harry’s dad, on Grimmo’s terrace, as though he wants to ask Harry whether he did in fact spend NEWTs sleeping around, instead of in a tent or often for twelve hours a day. And then he asks it anyway. “Did you?”

The expression on his face is annoying, always and forever and on this bright late-June morning. It’s as though he wants Harry to say no, but expects him to say yes, and he intends to pretend he supports it.

And Harry did a lot of sleeping around, as it happens, but there was never any sleeping besides on top of Draco and it certainly wasn’t during NEWTs.

“ _No,_ ” Harry snaps at his dad’s stupid glasses, staring him down, holding his knife and fork. “I went out with Ginny for a few weeks at the end of sixth year, and then I spent seventh in the great outdoors with Ron and Hermione.” And if he thinks… “And if you _think_ –”

“All right, Harry; he’s only asking,” Sirius comes out with, looking at him over the toast rack.

“Who’s Ginny?” his dad asks, and Harry has to claw at his knee. “No, right,” his dad corrects himself. “Ron and George’s sister. Snow White. The one getting married next week.”

He addresses this to Sirius, who nods shortly.

“A little close to home, no?” Harry’s dad directs at Harry, as though he can’t help interfering.

“Well, I fancied her at the time,” Harry says, to wind him up, “so that’s how it goes, innit?”

His dad makes a face, eyeing the back of the house.

“Nearly everyone ends up with someone from the village, Prongs,” Lupin points out mildly. He’s picking up the paper that was tucked underneath the edge of his plate. It seems to be missing the outer fold – the front and back page. Harry spots the extra sheet in front of Sirius.

It’s folded up to show the crossword, a few answers filled in, one of Harry’s mum’s biros resting at an angle on top.

Spotting it, Harry feels a flush of something warm, and finds his anger turning into something else.

“I don’t know…” his dad is saying, and he seems to be in his own conversation with the others.

Harry’s perspective twists, and he feels like he’s watching them through the window again. His stomach twists, and he feels nothing but yearning. Sitting with his dad and Sirius, it’s so clear what he feels for Lupin, which is the same, isn’t it? It has to be.

Harry says nothing; he shuts up. Lupin could have said something, he thinks resentfully. He could have suggested that when Harry wanted Sirius, he’d really been allowed to want –

He could have _acted_ –

Fervently Harry wishes that he could run back upstairs and start the whole morning again. He’d get to the window more quickly, he thinks, to hear what was said. He’d come out sooner, and just sit, not say anything, not cause any aggravation at all.

“Best mates’ sisters…” James is going on, and Harry watches him wrinkle his nose in distaste.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Sirius comes out with, grinning, tipping back up onto the rear legs of his chair. “You’re never still on about Alice.”

“He’s still on about Alice,” Lupin confirms, the paper covering half of his face.

This makes Sirius reach out, for some reason, and absently squeeze the upper part of Lupin’s arm. Harry doesn’t know how he feels.

“I know that they’re happy,” declares James, before frowning, barely glancing at this action. His gaze falls to his own hand on the table, the gold ring on his finger. “Were happy,” he decides. “ _Are_ happy,” he insists, directing this statement to the sky. It doesn’t seem to bother him, sitting in sweat when he should be having a shower. “But I remain convinced that Frank going after Caradoc’s sister –”

“It’s not morals, Prongs,” Sirius tells him, as though he’s delighted. “It’s _jealousy,_ admit it. You always did and always will nurse a tricky little pash for the lovely Alice Dearborn.”

“I will _not_ admit it,” snaps James, sitting up and forward, over his arm. “What kind of man would I be, to –?”

“There’s no shame in _feeling_ ,” Sirius insists, entirely smug. “You were given the chance to imagine _what if_ , and you had a good time. Your balls aren’t made of stone.”

“Another metaphor, Padfoot,” Lupin suggests. The words linger in the air, as though mocking James.

Sirius waves a hand dismissively, his chair clunking down to the decking. It is very irritating, Harry concedes.

He remembers the story, as it is. It’s one of his mum’s favourites: the time when Harry’s dad and Neville’s mum convinced the Gryffindor common room that they were going out. It was only to wind up Sirius (and Wormtail), which is presumably why Sirius is trying to win back the points he lost, thirty years later.

“We were _friends_ ,” James is saying, looking between both of his own, sounding terribly posh and terribly aggrieved. “We were sick to the back teeth of the rest of you.”

“Lily’s not about to file for divorce.” Sirius’s tone is emphatically reasonable. He’s also clearly on a wind-up. “She’s well aware –”

“She well aware of what you tell her, which has always been lies,” James blusters, before looking at Sirius dead on, glancing down and back up to his face. “And Merlin’s bloodhound, whence groweth that fucking carpet on your chest, Mr Padfoot?” he snaps, sounding utterly ridiculous. “It’s obscene.”

“My, my, how troubled we are by a little testosterone…” Sirius looks down at himself, frowning dramatically as though he’s not sure himself where all the hair’s come from, in honesty. He’s more muscle tone too, Harry supposes, than after Azkaban.

“It’s not the _testosterone_ ,” James complains, as though Sirius has struck a nerve. “Anything could be living in there. Hygiene!” he declares. “We’ll have to shear you like a sheep.”

Lupin snorts, not looking up from the paper. Harry thinks that it might actually be in amusement.

Finishing his breakfast, Harry reflects that a lot of the meals he eats in Grimmo end this way. Whatever it is they start off talking about, James and Sirius end up side-tracked halfway through, and from there it’s as though Harry’s invisible, watching, while they’re off somewhere in 1978.

It’s not good for them, Harry’s certain. Sirius hasn’t been confused in Harry’s presence since the second morning after he came back, but Harry can’t believe that it’s healthy, to constantly slip in and out of memory. He doesn’t know how to interrupt them, but he doesn’t like listening to it, and he finds that he has to think about something else.

Today, Harry lets his gaze rest on Sirius’s just-started crossword, the sound of his and his dad’s voices quick and mocking in his ears.

This could have been his childhood, he imagines, and he’s not sure how it makes him feel. Back when he was Teddy’s age, when he was vanishing glass at the zoo. Somewhere, maybe Godric’s Hollow, this could have been the morning.

In another house again, it could have been quiet, with Uncle Moony reading the paper and Sirius musing on the puzzles page, throwing clues at Harry while he did his summer homework, played with runes.

This thought makes Harry angry, somehow. He doesn’t know why Lupin cried before the memorial, to be stuck with Harry on the wards. He’s seen him chatting with Draco, and Lupin’s always animated with him. He pulls mocking expressions.

Sometimes, Harry dreams of the Mirror of Erised, and he thinks that he might have dreamt of it last night. By the end, he was burning the faces in the mirror with his hands, pressing palms to the glass and summoning chimaeras, dragons, phoenixes. He didn’t mean to; he doesn’t know why he dreamt it. He doesn’t feel good to have done so – and he wonders if Lupin can tell, that he’s the sort of person who dreams of these things.

“Harry?” someone’s asking him now, as he swallows the last swallow of his breakfast, yolky bread and tomato. It’s Sirius. Sirius whom Harry got killed. “Your dad’s asking what you want to do – about Skeeter.”

“Oh. Right. Dunno,” Harry says, meeting his father’s murky, watchful eyes. “I never know,” he jokes bluntly. “Ignore her and hope she goes away?”

This get a pause, rather than a laugh. His dad’s always thought him a lion, Harry remembers.

“We can’t hide forever,” says Harry’s dad after a moment, turning to Sirius as though resuming a debate and intent to let Harry save face. As though he’s ever spent any time hiding at all. As though it wasn’t a _joke_.

The man is an arrogant toerag, Harry thinks, and they don’t at all look the same.

“I say we get ahead of it,” James is planning like a quidditch captain. “Find someone we know inside the Ministry. Let them act like they’re the ones who are sharing the news. Darling Hermione’s been saying that the director of Mysteries will help fudge –”

Lupin interjects, not helpfully. “If we could please never use the word _fudge_ in this context,” he says, not looking up from the paper, and he might have forgotten Harry’s here. “It would make me a very happy old bastard indeed.”

“ _Seconded_ ,” says Sirius, in a high voice as though he’s being officious, a sarcastic grin mostly in his eyes. It’s only to be a pain, Harry thinks.

“Oof,” complains James, looking between the pair of them as though they’ve ganged up on him, which they have done, as far as Harry can tell.

“Fudge was the name of the Minister.” Harry finds it so irritating to have to explain. He doesn’t care that he explains things for a living. “Back when everything happened. He didn’t do a good job.”

“To put it mildly,” Lupin remarks. He’s still pretending that he’s reading the paper.

“Well,” James doesn’t accept, “I suppose that that’s a reason to salt the earth on a highly convenient word.”

They’re going to end up side-tracked again. Harry sighs, giving in. “Kingsley Shacklebolt will help, so don’t worry.” He rolls his eyes, because it’s political, this, more than anything. “He’s always said that I can owl him.”

“Kingsley?” Lupin reacts, sounding curious, his paper drooping slightly as he raises his head. “Really?” He looks down at newsprint, and he must be well caught up, Harry thinks.

“He’s still around?” Sirius asks, presumably as someone who only does the crossword. “What’s he doing these days?”

Harry groans and explains this to James, who’s looking entirely confused. “Kingsley’s the Minister,” he admits. “Since 2000. He was an auror and technically I helped on his campaign.” But that never _made_ him an auror, Harry resists the urge to point out.

“Ah,” accepts James, looking at him in the irritating way that he does, as though Harry’s very much a surprise. “Yes,” he agrees, popping his glasses slightly higher up his nose. He’s laughing a little, adjusted in an instant. “He sounds like a good start.”


	5. A summer holiday, part 2

The meeting with Kingsley goes well. He’s gone up in the world from laying false leads about Sirius, but he never seems to have forgotten the time when he called Harry more important than the muggle prime minister.

It’s irritating, mostly, given how useless Harry ever was as an aide. The appointment is made with no problem, after Harry is directed in a private, friendly note to write to Kingsley’s personal secretary (“Harry, I promise that this is how I organise all of my appointments, at least when I intend to keep them!”).

Ron tells him to stop looking so glum, when Rita Skeeter appears for the third day in a row. Hermione tells him that they must all have lunch, if the four of them are going to be in the Ministry building. She’ll drag Draco out of the Department.

Head Unspeakable Avalorne paves the way for their arrival and suggests that she receive them via portkey to her office. It’s difficult for Harry to trust himself and his parents, Lupin and Sirius to a portkey.

The night before the meeting, Harry stays up to unravel and re-thread the charmed inkwell, checking for interference. He refuses to sleep until it’s done and Draco _can’t_ sleep, so they work it through together in the flat’s kitchen with parchment and ink. For the trickier bits of arithmancy, Harry takes hold of Draco’s hand, because he finds that it helps him concentrate – and Draco calls him a soppy fucker, but he dozes well enough against their wrists on the table, jerking awake after twenty minutes because he thinks that Harry’s forgotten the directional substrate.

In the end, Harry doesn’t trust his arithmancy, even after Draco’s checked it. Lupin and Sirius go through the main entrance on the library pass that Hermione issued months ago. They act inconspicuous; Sirius wears some of Harry’s dad’s most boring robes (“I’ll pretend that I’m in administration.”). Draco apparates with Harry’s mum and dad and he’s supposed to come back for Harry – but Harry grows impatient and reckons that he at least knows the way in, after all the work on the portkey, so he apparates behind them and gets shouted at for what should have been twenty minutes but is instead only a gesture and a glare and one bright burst of feeling.

“For fuck’s sake, Potter; fuck!”

Or something like that.

Really, Draco’s embarrassed to act like he cares in front of Harry’s parents; Harry’s mum laughs at him for being daft and Harry’s dad laughs at Harry, delighted, because he’s broken into the _Ministry_. Harry tries not to feel anything, surprised by how vividly he expects Draco’s office to be covered in blood, irritated because breaking into the Ministry’s nothing to get excited about.

This is after Ginny’s wedding, by the way. The less said about that, the better.

They find Avalorne and take her private lift to the meeting. When they get there, Kingsley greets Lupin with the sort of manly half-hug which Harry supposes that Lupin should have greeted Sirius with, years ago. Especially given how Sirius smelled at the time. He shakes Sirius’s hand and there’s more mutual slapping of shoulders.

“James!” Kingsley then says, ministerial, holding out for another warm shake. “I remember you, of course. When you and this wannabe hooligan were in on work experience, with Flea!”

Harry has no idea who Flea is. He doesn’t ask, because this doesn’t seem like the moment for questions.

“ _Work experience_ ,” Lupin scoffs, making Harry’s mum laugh.

“ _No…_ ” James seems stunned, looking up at the man in front of him. “It’s never…”

He looks at Sirius, whose expression says clearly, _Who did you think we were talking about?_

“Auror _Shackle-the-bolt!_ ” James declares, grinning as though the name has struck a chord with him. He over-enunciates _shackle_ and _bolt_ , as though he hasn’t been hearing them correctly for any of the past week. It’s presumably the fault of Harry’s accent, which Harry’s always thought clear enough. “What have you done to yourself?” James goes on, demanding. “You were the renegade!”

His expression is alight, his handshake unconscious and cocky as ever and he claps Kingsley hard on the upper arm.

“Good man; how have you been?” The answer’s obvious. Kingsley’s only in his fifties, so he must have been twenty-five or younger when James knew him, Harry supposes, doing the sums. “What an excellent turn-out. Moody never did sack you, then, in the end?”

This gets a laugh, because presumably it was all jolly good fun. “No,” Kingsley accepts. “You were right all along.”

Of course he was, Harry thinks.

“Mrs Potter,” is Kingsley’s final greeting hello, much more solemn in tone. “It is an honour to meet you at last.”

“Likewise,” says Lily Potter, shaking his hand. She’s conspiring, friendly and warm, just like Harry should have been. “I’ve heard only good things.”

“And I too,” Kingsley replies. Somehow it’s clear that the joke is on James. “Indeed, I heard such an awful many good things, once upon a time.”

They all laugh, and Lily throws back her head. “I’m very popular,” she says, and it’s charming somehow. “Thank you for looking after our son,” she adds, leaning forward and touching Kingsley’s arm and he turns bashful, somehow.

Emotion turns over in Harry’s chest, because he doesn’t understand.

They whisk through the business, and Harry supposes that if Hermione had been there, or Draco or maybe even Ron, they might have paused for longer on the question of how everything came about. Harry too might have taken in a few more of the details, question marks and implications.

He’s not sure why he doesn’t pay attention to these things; he’s perfectly capable of keeping up.

The plan is made for an announcement, carefully trailed. A strange phenomenon in the Department of Mysteries, three wizards and a witch who have returned through the veil. A freak accident in combination with some unfathomably heavy, unutterably boring magical theory. A story fairly close to what actually happened.

As far as Harry can tell, the idea is to tease people so much that by the time that names are revealed, it’s nothing but an anticlimax. _Lily and James Potter?_ they want the public to ask, looking up from their newspapers. _I was hoping for John Dee._

That’s pretty much how it plays out. There’s no rioting, at least. No mass panic.

There’s the problem of Sirius’s conviction, but Kingsley thinks that this will be easily quashed by a hearing. Not necessarily by Lily or James or Lupin’s testimony, since no one’s sure that the average witch on the street, or in the Wizengamot, will feel comfortable that Lily, James or Lupin can testify to things that they saw before their deaths. They’re to be Harry’s dependants now, legally, with Sirius, like foundlings rescued from the snow. But Professor Potter, Unspeakable Granger, Auror Weasley and Headmistress McGonagall are respectable witnesses in their own right, and they have evidence enough in their memories to piece together an alternative narrative of what happened in 1981.

The _Daily Prophet_ covers Lily and James Potter’s return with lavish, unctuous adoration, though Harry won’t let Rita Skeeter in the house. Lily goes to meet her in a coffee shop, and the interview takes no negative angle at all.

There are features on the superfans who’ve convened in Godric’s Hollow, to meet with Lily and James. Old pictures emerge from Merlin knows where, and baby girls are called Dorcas and Marlene. New pictures are taken from a long way away of Lily out with Angelina Weasley and Alicia Finch-Fletchley and Katie Bell (29), auror.

 _ **A SECOND CHOSEN ONE?**_ the paper writes, speculating that Lily Potter is pregnant, by the final week of July. Harry can’t bear to ask or even think about it, barely leaving the house because the whole thing’s horrific and no one told him that this was a possibility.

(“Harry,” says Draco, when Harry brings it up. His tone is pure condescension. “If I have to explain to you at the age of twenty-seven –”)

One morning, Harry’s dad pours his mum a coffee and she says without looking, “Ta, bab.” She immediately turns bright brick red.

“What was that?” Harry’s dad demands, still holding the coffee pot.

“It was nothing,” says his mum, as though no one’s heard.

“What was that?” his dad repeats, light in his eyes and a grin stealing over his face.

“It was _nothing_ ,” his mum says again, her tone damning.

“Did you hear that?” declares Harry’s dad, gesturing for the benefit of everyone else at the table. “My wife loves me! She feels _affection_ towards her husband.”

“James, sit down. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

Right next to where Harry’s sitting, Sirius mutters into Lupin’s ear. “D’you remember the last time this happened?”

And Harry’s heart hammers violently in his chest. He excuses himself quickly.

Ron and Hermione have successfully become engaged by this point, quietly and neatly, out of the way. “The wedding won’t be at least till next summer,” Hermione tells Harry, and he forces himself to look at her bright eyes and feel thrilled and delighted and ecstatic, rather than distracted, his head full of beetles and news.

Draco knew this was coming, so Harry focuses on that, because it’s _hilarious_.

They go out to a pub somewhere in Kent, the evening when Harry finds out. Nowhere particularly interesting; it’s a chain. 

“Yeah,” is all that Ron says for most of the evening, looking pale. He keeps holding his pint at his chin, lost in thought, forgetting that he’s supposed to drink it. 

“He’s been dithering about proposing for months,” Hermione tells Harry, fondly with a sarcastic look.

“He does dither very well,” Draco supplies, drinking beer. Harry takes hold of his hand, out of sight, trying not to fidget and quite possibly climb out of his seat and onto the table so that he can shout at all the muggles, who surely won’t care, that _Ron_ and _Hermione_ are finally engaged.

“If he’d have done it in March,” Hermione says lightly, smug, wearing deep blue, brushing hair back from her face with one hand now glimmering, metal and stone on her finger, a rainbow of light, “he might have been paying attention enough not to get me up the spout.”

When the point lands, a second piece of news but not strange at all, just exciting, Harry bursts out laughing, pressing the base of one palm to his forehead. Draco squeezes the other, and Harry wants this to be his life, so badly. “Did you know about this too?” he can’t help but ask him.

“She stopped drinking two weeks before the end of term,” Draco says, meaning, _Obviously, Potter; I know everything._

It takes a few moments for Harry to control himself. From Ron’s face, it's clear that he’s only just found out.

“But you were drinking at the wedding,” Harry insists, and he’s finally able to look at Hermione again. “Weren’t you?” He’s not sure that he can remember.

Hermione smiles, her face rounder now that Harry really looks at it. He’s willing to believe there’s a glow. “I was happy,” she says, taking hold of Ron’s pint before it spills and sneaking an appreciative sip before she puts it down. “Mm – the rest of you were so far gone, it was easy to get caught up in the mood.”

She’s being kind with this, talking about one thing rather than the other. Harry lets her, turning to Draco, who looks back at him, pretending to be indifferent, as usual, an odd smile he can’t suppress pulling at his face.

Harry can’t help but tell him. “She told me that I should feel comfortable snogging you in front of her and Ron.” Draco wasn’t at the wedding. It doesn’t matter. Apparently he spent the day a few weeks before making compacts with fairies, as one did, for the ring now on Hermione’s finger. “And then she snogged Ron in front of me,” Harry carries on, kicking the toe of his trainer into the side of Draco’s shoe, out of sight, to needle him. “For _ages_.”

Draco’s twilight-grey eyes flash with something like sunlight. “What, and you watched?” he asks, filthy, and Harry can’t look away from his face.

“Of course I didn’t _watch_.” Harry makes the appropriate expression of disgust, sitting with Draco on this bench of this booth in this pub, where the air smells like pineapple juice. “I ran very far away.”

“That’s not like you.” Draco’s eyes lower to his mouth, before he looks up again.

Harry glances at Hermione, because they’re talking about her. She’s biting her lip and leaning into Ron, who’s wrapping an arm around her shoulders, looking off towards the bar.

Looking back to Draco, who’s so near and so vivid, Harry almost does lean forward and kiss him. It doesn’t happen, though. Harry just stares, and Draco stares insolently back, his eyes like the sky at dawn.

For some reason, suddenly, Harry imagines himself at fifteen, trying to reach out and take Cho Chang’s hand like a snitch.

For some reason, he’s struck by the fact that Draco isn’t Cho Chang, and that he has to hold himself back instead of urge himself forward, and that people still shout stuff sometimes, in 2008, and Draco can’t bear it when people are shouting –

He finds himself fussing, flustered, his hand clammy when he lets go of Draco’s, of Malfoy’s, whose hand it’s bizarre to be holding, isn’t it? “There’s hair all over your face.” An errant lock of it, bone white, has flopped down over his forehead. Harry tries to fix it. “Why’s this bit too short or too long or whatever it is that makes it not sit where it’s supposed to?”

He’s brushing it to about where it should be, but Malfoy slaps his hands away, raking his fingers through white and messing the whole lot of it up. “Some of us have hair that reacts to atmospheric forces, Potter,” he says, because it was raining when they apparated in.

“ _Some of us have hair – rah rah rah,_ ” Harry mocks him like a child, trying to get at the parts out of place while Malfoy ducks to avoid him, looking incensed.

Ron coughs at this point, clearing his throat. Harry blinks and remembers to keep his hands to himself. Or something. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing.

By his side, Malfoy’s face flushes pink like a peony, because he really is horribly daft, and Harry remembers how fun it is to make him uncomfortable.

So Harry doesn’t kiss him, but he does put a hand on his thigh right there and grope. It’s easier when he’s not wearing robes.

Ron laughs as Malfoy jumps. Hermione looks tearful.

Naturally, Malfoy shoves Harry off, declaring loudly that he’s never understood why he keeps up with anyone of Gryffindor and what are Ron and Hermione going to name the spawn anyway, “Lancelot Hydrahide Ironslash _Burn_ Granger-Weasley?”

Ron is immediately chastened, picking up his pint and messing up his swallow.

“I wouldn’t mind a girl,” says Hermione archly, patting Ron roughly on the back. “And we’re going to wait and see – but yes, that sounds lovely. We can call him or her Burny, for short.”

Harry laughs; Malfoy fumes.

“No hyphen, though,” Hermione insists, narrowing her eyes. “I can hear it in your voice.”

“I des _pair_ ,” Malfoy spits, and Harry decides to stand up on the bench and insist that the muggles raise their glasses, just once, to his best friends in the world, before he does something even more stupid.

A few of the muggles even do raise their glasses. Most of them look at him askance, but that’s fine. One of them shouts at him to sit down. He tells them to piss off.

Anyway, back to the papers.

Lupin’s return is mentioned in a single short sentence. The caption to the _Prophet_ ’s front-page photograph calls him Romulus. Harry gets the impression that Lupin is perfectly content with this lack of attention, so he tries not to dwell on it.

Sirius –

Well.

Sirius is a notoriously twisted mass-murderer, according to the editorial line of Diagon Alley’s _Daily Prophet_. A by-word for the wickedness of the dark. Even when it’s clear which way the hearing will go and even when Lily and James Potter release a statement about their firm belief in Sirius’s innocence – which isn’t contempt of court, because Sirius was convicted a generation ago and served time – the paper is reluctant to give up this position.

By the day of the hearing, as a gloss on the _Prophet_ ’s full ten-page spread of coverage, Rita Skeeter has been commissioned for an op-ed, and what she comes up with is a confection of old society rumours from the seventies, the last will and testament of one Alphard Black, a potted history of ownership rights to number 12, Grimmauld Place, some positively ancient stuff about Dumbledore and then, finally, the rumour, nay the fact, that Harry Potter – our precious Harry Potter, the boy who lived, so shy in the light of publicity, so damaged by the war – is living with and has been seen on his own in a restaurant with none other than this man, Sirius Black, who should be known for his scant few personal relationships and his disturbing, troubled past.

This is Sirius Black, whom peers remember tagging along with James Potter, desperate for recognition, obsessive. Sirius Black, who had no other friends, while James Potter was popular with so many, quidditch captain and head boy.

And not only does he take Harry Potter out for meals now, Sirius Black (48), no history of any long-term relationships, both of them reclusive when Lily and James are so well adjusted – but he spent time with Harry Potter at the tender, impressionable age of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, during a period when Harry Potter was clearly troubled, yes, and surely vulnerable, as long-time _Prophet_ readers will recall.

And let no one forget, Lily and James Potter have always had one weakness: their unfailing trust in their friends.

There’s silence at the breakfast table, while Sirius reads this out. The _Daily Prophet_ ’s mind has always been filthy, Harry thinks.

“Harry, the jig’s up,” says Sirius once he’s finished, clearly intent to make the whole thing a joke. The paper crackles as it collapses in front of him, the broadsheet a windless sail across his front. “It’s now or never.” The colour in his eyes is flat. He’s not moving, and there are beans soaking into the front page. “You get the bags and I’ll get the portkey. We can be in France in an hour, and from there it’s wherever we want.”

The irony is that Harry and Draco are in fact planning to holiday in France for the second week of August, via portkey. They’re going to buy wine for the cellar, from vineyards. It was Draco’s gift to himself for his twenty-eighth birthday.

Harry gave him books. He’s not sure about the portkey anymore, but he only put in for a magical passport, so it’s too late to go by a muggle route without doing something illegal.

This – has not been ruled out.

“Harry?” someone asks him, as though he’s not been listening.

The stuff about Sirius, right.

Coming back to himself, to the breakfast room, Harry looks at the newspaper, sucking up beans. None of it matters, in the end. It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. But the line of it has been threatening everyone close to Harry for years. She’s been playing the long game, Rita Skeeter, Harry thinks sometimes. She saw her opportunity for two decades of lucrative stories the moment that Harry looked up at her, confused, in the cupboard.

He should have realised, Harry thinks. He should have played it differently. Skeeter joined the animagus register after the war, and Harry used to carry bug spray in his bag, but it was all much too late.

“This is your fault,” Harry manages, turning to his dad because it’s easy, and there’s a harsh, burning feeling in his chest. All of his dad’s optimism and virtue – his need to _get ahead of it_ … He looks ashen, which is even more maddening; Harry’s mum is stormy by his side. “Why did you talk to them?”

“It’s not your dad’s fault, Harry,” says Ron, far too reasonably.

He’s further down the bench, leaning over the table. Hermione’s between them, bristling. Harry has a feeling that she’s about to explode. Draco is on Harry’s right, the other side, and he’s looking straight ahead with no expression at all. Harry can only imagine him smeared with newspaper mud, which would stick when it was –

Everything Harry touches, Harry thinks, looking at his parents. The bright shine’s been taken off them; they look used and harsh.

“It hardly matters –” Sirius is saying.

Lupin is up at the end of the table, and he looks pained, watching Sirius. His eyes catch on Harry’s, and then he’s looking away. Don’t you have anything to say? Harry moves to shout at him –

“They’ll regret this,” says Harry’s mum then, determined.

– and Harry goes off at her instead. “Why would they regret it?” he snaps, struck by sharp green eyes, standing up. “They never have before. I _told_ you –”

“We’re not taking this lying down –” his mum snaps back directly, on her feet too, in an instant. Her hair is dark red like blood, her eyes bright like lightning, and Harry would have been surprised by her shouting if his own blood wasn’t too busy rushing.

He’ll realise later that he’s never spoken like this to his mum and that it seems out of character, for her to shout at him back.

“How should we take it?” Harry demands. “Swords in our chest on our feet? Yeah, great. Let’s bleed out all over the floor.”

Green eyes blaze at him. “Anything would be better than moping around being _sarky,_ my son.”

Harry laughs, because this is almost hurtful. Also funny, in a way that’s surreal.

“Stop it, just _stop it_ ,” Hermione shouts, slamming her hands smack on the table as she stands up too.

Harry’s not surprised; he barely reacts, his heart already in his throat. Hermione’s always been like this about the _Daily Prophet_.

“I don’t want to hear another word of that _poison_ ,” Hermione swears, wrenching the newspaper out of Sirius’s hands and crumpling it up in her own.

The mess of the paper becomes smaller and smaller as she works it, entirely unbothered by the beans getting over her hands. She hisses some sort of shrinking spell, but Harry has a feeling that it’s something more vicious than that, entirely unnecessary, and he’s vindicated when Hermione ends up holding a ball of what looks like wood pulp, yellow and fibrous and wet in her hands.

She throws it to the floor in a fit of pique, her hands covered in orange and ink, and the ball doesn’t bounce or roll; it squelches on the stones like pure misery.

“I was reading that,” Lupin says mildly, frowning at the thing on the floor.

James laughs shortly, looking at the mess. His arm is around Harry’s mum as they all sit back down, holding her to him and working his thumb back and forth around the curve her shoulder. Harry loathes him.

“The _Daily Prophet_ was banned from this house for many years,” Ron explains, knowing better than to try and calm down Hermione. She’s still fuming. “We took the _Quibbler_ before it got sold. It was only puzzles by the end.”

Harry looks at Sirius, but he doesn’t react. As though he’s too cool for puzzles. Or else –

“I’m reinstituting the ban!” Hermione declares, visibly shaking.

With an unholy screech of wooden table on stone – which makes Draco startle and Harry reflexively reach out to take his wrist – Sirius pushes the breakfast things away from him and stands up, turning easily as a man around the back of the bench and off towards the stairs.

Draco’s wrist feels like it’s going to crack; Harry has to let it go.

“You’re all making a fuss over nothing,” declares Sirius. His eyes are flat, when Harry catches them. “Where’s your sense of humour?” he adds as though they’ve bored him.

It’s Harry’s dad who follows him (“ _Padfoot,_ ”), not Lupin, and this only makes Harry angrier.

Elbows on the table, his mum rakes fingers through her hair, her eyes blazing like floo-fire flame.

* * *

As July ends, Harry dreams. It’s a dream; Harry’s sure of it. He’s glad to sink into it.

It’s night, and sometimes in the heart of the night strange things happen. Sometimes, all of Harry’s thoughts and feelings escape him besides those concerned with the body and the breath and the voice of the person underneath him, above him, in his arms. It’s a guilty pleasure, really, to escape.

He used to find himself in strange places, having this dream. Here – it’s much better.

It’s better because he’s with someone he loves and it’s better because he’s in a bed which he knows that he can sleep in, when this is done. It’s huge, and it’s grey, and it’s Draco Malfoy, of everyone utterly ridiculous for Harry to shag.

It’s always the same. By the time that Harry’s got him how he likes him, Draco won’t be wearing a single stitch of black, and he gathers himself like something newly wound, bright limbs at angles surrounded by slate, chest heaving as he breathes. He looks gorgeous surrounded by this colour, and it’s enough to cut Harry’s laughter from his lungs.

Black turns him to contrasts: his hair is white; his skin is white; his eyes are pale, clean stone. Against grey, when his chest is heaving, his skin is blossom pink, his hair is buttermilk cream, his eyes are nothing but hazy English sky.

They’re primary colours, together, blossom, cream and sky – tints of red and yellow and blue. Underneath Harry, Draco looks like a schoolchild’s drawing in chalk, something innocent.

Crawling over him, touching his chest, Harry tells him, “I love you,” because he’s not sure what else to say.

“I’m aware,” Draco answers, eyes blue, as though he finds the fact amusing.

It was never like this in school.

And Draco isn’t innocent, Harry knows, if he ever was. He’s guilty as sin – but they’re guilty of the same things, in the end, once the politics has been stripped away.

Sometimes Harry doesn’t know why politics matters. Conspiracy to murder; magically aggravated assault; incidental use of the Imperius and Cruciatus Curses… The charges are more than enough for life in Azkaban, and after that, who keeps counting?

They all feel it, though Harry wishes that he didn’t feel it now. Once, when they were up late and waiting for Ron to come home, Hermione told Harry that she sometimes thinks about Marietta Edgecombe (“It was so _lawless_ , everything we did.”). Harry told her about Dumbledore’s office, and how he thinks that he saw the headmaster, or maybe it was the Minister, use the Imperius Curse to keep the girl silent.

Hearing this made Hermione cry, silently and then forcefully until Ron came home, so Harry’s never brought it up again.

Dumbledore always knew, Harry expects, that Draco didn’t have it in him to go all the way. He can’t have had any such qualms about Harry, who’s only ever needed the right buttons pushed.

Because it’s a brilliant charm, _Expelliarmus_. It’s unpredictable, the way that wands are themselves. It’s performed wandlessly, when a wand is stolen by hand: that’s the rule. Rather than thought, in essence, it only needs force – which makes it the exception to nearly every law that Charms students learn for their NEWTs.

The elder wand played its part in the Battle of Hogwarts – but when Harry thinks of Voldemort falling to his death at the end of things, he often only thinks of that charm and the strength of his hand around the slender stick of hawthorn he stole. Its core was bright unicorn hair, which Harry bent to his will.

It was that corruption of innocence by which the war was won. It was that corruption of innocence which Dumbledore must have known that Harry was capable of, no matter that Harry was too thick to see it coming.

Compared to Draco, Harry thinks, in this dream of high summer as he turns twenty-eight, compared to the grey all around them, Harry’s arms look like bronze. His extremities glow an angry red with his blood, and his cock is already coming back to life. He reminds himself of Greek pottery from the British Museum, all black hair and horses and helmets and wings and erections. He’s sweating, mostly under his arms but otherwise everywhere, and he knows that he became this terrible person through choice. This predatory, sexual person; this wolf.

He could have died with only the memory of Ginny’s goodbye kiss, but he didn’t want to, did he? He wanted to come back and finish it.

It worries him that Draco likes to have him touch him in his every softest place. His own, he’s sure, are long gone. “Why is it?” Harry asks Draco in this dream, his figure drawn in chalk, his own fingers tracing the shades of it. “Why’m I always the one who does you?”

“I thought you liked it,” says Draco, stilling underneath him, suspicious. His flush is fading to something other than pink.

Harry cuts a violent knee between his legs, which part like butter. Draco pushes himself up on a heel, and Harry feels the plane of his chest, resting his hand on his diaphragm. “I like it a lot,” he says, and he lets his fingers trail down through blond hair, thick like spun sugar. He likes the way that it makes Draco twitch, his eyes assessing. “I’m asking why you do, I s’pose.”

Draco doesn’t relax, frowning at this question. His breath is hitching, and his knee kicks like a rabbit.

Harry nudges closer and kisses him, pulling on his shoulder until they’re slid close and entangled with too many limbs. Draco’s response is careful, guarded, testing hypotheses.

“You can tell me anything you like,” Harry promises, encouraging him to commit.

His hands catch on Harry’s elbows, but they end up in Harry’s hair, taking his face by the jaw. “I’m extraordinarily lazy,” Draco says shortly, as though this might be an explanation. He glares at Harry with cold, glinting eyes, his lies obvious. “Of course I prefer it when you do the work.”

“What a load of rubbish,” Harry tells him, kissing him again and shifting so their middles meet, making Draco shudder. He presses forward with his tongue.

When Draco moans on a good hit of this, his eyes are closed – but then he blinks up, looking speculative. He doesn’t seem to want to talk, but then he sweeps a hand from Harry’s shoulder to his neck and around him. “Has anyone ever been up there?” he asks, his eyes dawn-sky blue, and it’s clear what he means.

“Maybe,” Harry tells him, shrugging, because he doesn’t know.

“Darling,” Draco says, his eyes softening. He’s plainly flirting, or else this is plainly a dream, because the answer _maybe_ to this question would usually make Draco swear.

As it is, he eases them down to their sides, and somehow it’s his leg between Harry’s two, his heel pressing and rolling into Harry’s tender ankle and making him shiver.

He’s cradling Harry’s head somehow and spreading fingers through his hair, tweaking and twirling so that Harry looks up.

“Close your eyes and don’t think,” he demands, before his mouth is so close and not coming closer. Harry closes his eyes, and he tries not to think, and he almost can’t take it until he feels the tip of Draco’s pointy nose nudge his own. He forces himself to relax, to let Draco kiss him soft and slow and work deeper his own way.

A hand starts playing with the underneath of him, and muscle memory states that there’ll soon be a firm grip around him, dragging. Everything between Harry’s hips tightens in anticipation. But then the hand goes somewhere else, nudging until Harry’s legs aren’t touched together anymore, and then those same legs are settling – failing to settle, mostly writhing, tense – around a long shaft of wrist, forearm and elbow, which Harry stupidly tries to rub off like a cock. Draco’s kissing him harder, feeling him up.

There’s a shuffle of fingers – a click, Harry imagines – and then it feels distracting, insistent, intimate and odd. Harry focuses on kissing the man in his arms, the touch of skin and bone filling his mind with softly pornographic images of Draco Malfoy’s body moving, lean and blond and hungry and brutal. It makes him grin and fall into a kiss again, because it’s such a lovely fantasy.

“Stop laughing,” he’s told, by someone who’s definitely amused. It makes him grin more, because he’s enjoying having sex with this person, whoever they are.

Like a rebuke, then, there’s something inside him, making him jump. It’s like a germ or a thought or a twinge, and then it feels nice, and then it feels nicer and it’s terribly odd, coming from inside him, sharp and exciting. His cock’s reacting and Harry doesn’t know what to do with his ankles and knees, wanting to run.

He breathes, hunching into himself, eyes shut, his toes curling with the bite of this feeling. He realises that he’s been caught in a circle of arms, and his thighs are burning like so often, surely red, and he’s on fire; he’s panicking; he needs to fly away.

It doesn’t settle and fade, the feeling; it grows.

“Shh-hh,” he’s told when he can’t hold in his hiss of panic, and someone’s kissing him shallowly. “Relax. Let it be good.”

Now Harry groans, because it’s like he’s being kneaded with pleasure and with heat, transformed into bread from nothing but dust, and he’s never been someone who’s had flesh to knead. The middle of him is on fire, it’s on fire, and he’s not sure –

“Let me take care of you.”

“I’m not a fucking _virgin_ ,” he snaps, opening his eyes, feeling angry, the way he always did when he was young.

Swirling with colour, Malfoy’s eyes are storm clouds, hardening solid to dark ice. “How proud you must have been,” he says sharply, entirely eyes. “When you could finally say that.”

He doesn’t remove his hand or his fingers, up inside him – and Harry doesn’t pull himself free of them. It’s stupid, because with what seems like only a single further rough twitch, maybe two or a dozen – Merlin, _there_ – Harry’s coming all over them, his vision flashing incandescent even as he closes his eyes and curls up.

It’s bright for a moment. Everything’s bright.

Then the wave crests and Harry doesn’t know if he likes it, not the cooling of the aftermath and as Malfoy’s hand slips away, bony between the jelly of his legs. Harry feels weak, pained by these jolts of relaxation. He feels paralysed, as though he’s under a hex that’s taken hold of his limbs. He feels used; he feels bitter. He doesn’t feel like he’s in love.

“Perhaps this is why,” Malfoy tells him coolly, even as Harry’s eyes are stinging, unable to focus, and he feels drowsy, collapsing and vulnerable, alone. “You make a terrible hole, Potter.”

“ _Please,_ ” Harry begs him, pressing forward with every ounce of strength he has left, to escape.

He overreaches, and Draco ends up on his back, his head once more snug against the puff of grey pillows. He looks surprised.

“You can say it,” Harry begs him, looking down at ice-cold eyes. Promise that you love me, his own voice sounds desperate in his head. He can never remember how Draco says the words.

There’s a tremor in his arm, grazed by Draco’s hair, but he can feel the strength returning to it, biting down on his teeth. Its colour is definitely bronze. He presses his other hand to Draco’s silvery scarred sternum and it’s heavy, weak. His fingers are red and hot and Draco feels cold, the way that he must have been when he was near death, his scars then new cuts, pouring out blood.

Merlin knows what Snape said to Dumbledore about Harry’s role in that.

Maybe Dumbledore was glad to hear it, he speculates, to have proof.

“ _Please,_ ” Harry begs lines of silver, wanting to forget. “Somebody has to –”

“Harry,” says Draco, sighing wretchedly, taking his hand.

“It’s not my fault,” Harry begs him, his muscles quaking. He knows that he’s lying; he was always a liar. “I wasn’t made for this – I was only… I was made for other things.” For fighting in wars, he wants to say, because it’s true. His eyes are stinging and he wants to start this dream again. He wants to react a different way, to be loving and gentle and kind like his mother, when Harry’s not making her shout.

“Sometimes I think that I was only made for you to kill me,” Draco tells him. “So it’s about penetration, you see,” he’s now saying when Harry opens his eyes, talking about getting fucked. His colouring is stark and statuesque. “The ecstasy of self-harm. The _release_ from fear and anticipation.”

Harry looks down at his mouth, which is a little more smirking than neutral. “What?” he breathes out. He looks back up to his eyes, which are insolent with sympathy. And then to his mouth again. “Are you laughing at me?” Harry has to ask him, the feeling in his eyes dying back.

Draco’s mouth pulls around his teeth, his grin obscene and the flare in his expression entirely malevolent. “Of course I’m laughing at you,” he says. “What the fuck are you on about? We all love _you_ , Harry Potter.”

Harry laughs and then he’s crying. He hates crying. He doesn’t like himself when he does it.

Lying underneath him, Draco’s expression cracks into something revealing. He says nothing, and his fingers walk to Harry’s shoulder as Harry wipes his face, but Harry won’t let himself be pulled down.

“You’re not hurting me,” Draco informs him, rolling his eyes as though he finds it disappointing. He continues, explaining biology, the state of arousal, none of which Harry’s heard before. “I don’t find it humiliating,” he adds, and it would be horribly awkward, if this wasn’t a dream. “I only want you to touch me,” Draco admits in the end, making a face as though this is embarrassing.

Tears are getting on Harry’s fingers, even as he laughs. “But that’s what I want too.”

“Do you really?” Draco asks sceptically, bright and pale underneath him.

Harry looks at his arm, which is red against Draco’s silver-scarred ribs. “I don’t want you to feel any pain,” he admits.

“Mm…” suggests Draco, as though he wouldn’t mind, trailing pale fingers down Harry’s chest.

It makes Harry’s eyes close and all his thoughts flicker into smoke.

There’s a chuckling noise, quiet. Draco is laughing at him audibly now.

Harry says nothing, refusing to give him the satisfaction, just shakes his head and wraps his hand around Draco’s knuckles, dragging their hands to his cock, which appreciates it. His eyes flutter open and – “Oh.” It’s like looking at Draco in the light.

He’s had enough, he decides, though, looking. He’s moves Draco’s hand to his own stiff erection, showing him what to do; he sets him higher on his back and shudders as Draco complains, watching him in anticipation, biting his red lip.

This is better, Harry thinks, setting himself up, knowing well where he’s going, because he’s been here before.

“You are a _whore,_ ” Draco accuses as Harry sinks in, but the acid’s all escaped him, and he’s not trying to be hurtful. He gives up on wanking to pull at Harry’s hair, the lazy git, turning pink, breathing harshly through his nose as Harry makes him twitch.

Harry grins, feeling him everywhere. “Every time I get you like this, it’s like I’ve laid a ghost to rest.”

“I’d happily return the favour,” Draco insists, all curled up and using his legs to grab at Harry’s sides. “Mm –”

“Nah,” Harry informs him, and he knows what to say, dropping down, his voice low, the air between them hot and Draco’s body bright and soft and – “I like it when you bring my ghosts back to life.”

“Fuck – _fuck,_ ” Draco splutters because Harry’s been trite, rolling his head back, eyes shut, his throat long.

He wrenches at Harry’s hair with both hands, and Harry doesn’t think about his prick up his bum, just everything that he can see. He wants to say something witty, but a load of guff comes out instead, about Draco looking like the morning and how much he loves him, all while Draco is keening at him.

He’s very close to the edge when he speaks again, at last, Draco Malfoy. “I could fuck you and call out the name of your father?” he suggests with a grunt, as though it’s absurd, the dirtiest joke that’s come into his head, distantly related to Harry’s line about ghosts.

And Harry grins, kissing him on the mouth. “Already been there,” he says, because this is only a dream. Draco’s eyes flare open with shock, and then with a moment of suspension and a jerk, they’re getting each other in a mess and Harry’s sucking on Draco’s neck instead of howling.

A long time has passed since this happened, so Harry laughs to see the expression on Draco’s face as they're recovering, as Draco’s sitting up and Harry’s heart is pounding. He remembers sucking off a wizard five years ago, something like that, who looked older outside than he’d looked in the lights. It was definitely _James_ that he said at the end.

Spluttering and wheezing in this dream, Draco swears, “ _Fuck._ ” His eyes don’t stray from Harry’s, even as they blink and he shudders and he takes Harry’s hand and he covers his mouth and his nose with the back of the other. “Fuck, that isn’t funny,” he repeats, struggling to breathe.

“It was fine,” Harry promises, turning down his mouth in dismissal. He’s glad it was him, instead of his father. The bloke was pretty rough. “I never saw him again.”

“That is not the definition of _fine_ ,” Draco snaps, and there are tears in his eyes, so very strangely.

Harry rolls onto his back and pulls him into his arms, all sticky, smelling the earthy smell of his neck, nose in his own spit.

“You’ve been fucked too many times; that’s your problem,” Draco tells him harshly, too simply, rolling over, curling up to pull Harry around him. His voice is strong. This may be the end of the dream, Harry thinks, with them both nestled into the pillows. “No one likes to bring their work home.”

“Is that where we are?” Harry asks him, tucking his nose into the back of his hair, pressing his mouth to the nape of it.

Draco brings one of Harry’s hands to his mouth and kisses old scars, holding it there while he reaches for his wand and casts _Nox_. “You tell me,” he suggests, and as a dream it all ends inconclusively.

* * *

On Harry’s birthday, in the morning, James and Sirius try to give him a broom.

Harry knows what it is before he opens it. The long, slender form is impossible to mistake, wrapped in gold paper with a bow of red ribbon. It’s tasteful. Thematic.

It isn’t a present for a child, by appearances, but Harry knows what James and his mate are doing anyway. They’re trying to spoil him. Sirius has done it before.

“I’ve got my Firebolt,” Harry says, feeling the weight of his hands on his knees. It’s difficult to raise his eyes from the shape of the broomstick. It’s difficult to speak.

James scoffs on the other side of the drawing room’s coffee table. “The balance has gone,” he says, as though Harry is being obtuse. They’re surrounded by golden sunshine-yellow. “I’ve seen you; you’re constantly correcting for it.”

It’s true. The brooms that Ginny has given Harry and Ron over the years are in much better shape, no matter that they’ve been put through the paces of professional use. As a model, the original Firebolt is no longer held in high regard: the acceleration charms were too heavily applied and Harry thought that the handle was ash at the time, but really it’s ebony, and that’s much too dense to mature with heavy charms. It’s a beautiful broom to look at, still, but Harry doesn’t know anyone who wasn’t having problems with theirs by around 2003.

All the same – “I’m attached to it,” Harry says. It seems unnecessary to spell out why, even if he can’t look his godfather in the face.

“Godric fucking Gryffindor,” declares James, impatient, laughing, a flurry of movement above the gold-wrapped broom in Harry’s peripheral vision. “Padfoot, he’s as bad as you.”

“Shush, James,” scolds Harry’s mum, next to Harry on the sofa.

Everyone’s on edge, and Harry knows that it’s his fault. He hates it, and yet all the same his skin is crawling.

He doesn’t know where his friends are. He doesn’t know why they have to be at work, all of them at the Ministry, Ron and Hermione and Draco, abandoning him here with this _broomstick_ , wrapped in crisp, gleaming paper, expensive and rippling, more like snakeskin than parchment, the ribbon thick and broad and sensuous.

What has Harry done to deserve this – to be trapped in this room with this _present?_ With this golden cobra, it feels like, deadly poisonous and untouchable, a broad hood and a slinking tail. He wants to ask the thing its business, where it’s come from and what it intends to achieve.

“Harry, it’s been fifteen years,” now Sirius is saying, a figure in black, directly opposite him. “You’re allowed a new broomstick. We’ll go out and let your mum and dad see what you can do,” he suggests, posher than Harry remembers.

Lupin is on Harry’s right, less awkward than he might be, balanced on the sofa arm. He’s saying nothing, but as Harry’s right hand shakes, just once, he lets a warm hand come to rest on Harry’s shoulder and squeeze.

Harry’s not sure that they’ve spoken in approximately twelve weeks.

He has to unwrap the broom. He realises this, the moment that he recognises the emotion in his chest. Fear is the one thing that he knows he can’t run from. It only ever comes with.

Unable to lift his gaze, conscious of the heavy eyes watching him, Harry leans forward and awkwardly pulls one leg of the red ribbon’s bow so that the knot comes loose. He rests a hand on the cool golden paper and he feels the weight of the broom as he turns it over on the coffee table, drawing his wand from his sleeve to tap the spellotape loose. His fingers trace folds of gold, the verso of the paper gleaming violet, and slowly the broomstick is revealed, fresh with the smell of new wood and polish.

In 2008, Harry doesn’t know the latest models of broomstick. Yet he feels it – the luxury of this broom, the expense and care which have gone into making it. In spite of its name, the Firebolt is all darkness: a black-brown handle, bound with cold iron, the hazel twigs sleek and shadowed brown-grey. Lying on rich purple paper, this broom’s handle is vivid, fierce rosewood, its bindings brass, its head a tapered, brushy mixture of rushes and feathers, peacock eyes.

It’s an exhibition broom, Harry expects. It’s ostentatiously magical, rather than a tool for speed to be used and used and thrown away. It’s for games which are for fun, rather than for stakes, and it’s the promise of a good time in the sky. Harry wouldn’t have called it his taste, ten or twelve years ago, but now he thinks of the embroidered robes that he owns in purple and blue. He likes magical things. He likes things that look magic.

His fingers graze the air above the broom, six inches away, and it hums. A deep golden hum, filling his bones with bright warmth. He could talk to it as easily as a snake, he expects, and it would just as easily talk back.

The money will have come from vaults in his name, because these four are his dependants, foundlings from the snow. But that doesn’t matter. Harry didn’t choose to buy this – that’s the point. He didn’t choose it, but it’s here for him anyway. It’s his, it belongs to him, or something like that. He can feel the disappointment of receiving a coat hanger and an angular fifty-pence piece. He can feel the dashed hope of opening the Firebolt on Christmas morning and being dobbed in by Hermione to McGonagall.

“You’ve been dead,” he says, choking, unable to explain. “You don’t know.”

Harry’s breath won’t stay in his chest. His lungs feel flat, his throat empty. His eyes feel hot and sharp to look at the thing, to imagine how beautifully it would fly.

Finally, Harry looks up, and he meets his godfather’s eyes, which are full of confusion and concern.

Shaking off Lupin’s presence to his right, his mum who’s reaching for him and saying a pet version of his name, Harry stands up. His fingers feel cold to leave the rosewood broom behind. “Thank you,” he tells Sirius, as calmly as he’s able to. “Thanks, Dad,” he adds, looking James in the eye even as the words taste sour on his tongue.

The man looks vulnerable, almost hurt, his forehead wrinkling with a frown.

“It’s really nice,” Harry manages. “You know it’s really nice,” he adds, embarrassed to be stating the obvious, looking down. He looks off towards the doorway, freedom. He can’t fight this, and it’s not fear he feels anymore. There’s only one option left. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Harry leaves them, and their eyes all feel heavy, but he makes it to the landing and down the stairs without breaking into a run. He makes it to the front door and out and onto Grimmauld Place. He makes it out into London, the morning, and he keeps walking, unconsciously aiming for the Leaky Cauldron, consciously directing himself another way, mostly going in circles, stuck on the ground.

He ends up in the British Museum, looking at vases.


	6. A summer holiday, part 3

That day, his twenty-eighth birthday, Harry gets back to Grimmo at quarter-past six. He means to get back at six o’clock sharp, expecting Hermione by around twenty-past, but he’s running late and she’s running early, and he feels her arrive just as he’s turning onto the square.

She’s on her own, but that’s no surprise. Ron will be caught up with something and Draco will have lost track of things, Harry imagines. He went in late because Harry kept him up until dawn; he’ll be home if and when he remembers. Harry’s not sure that he wants him to.

The result is that Hermione’s confronted with the questions, everyone clustered in the parlour as if waiting for her or Harry to come through the floo.

“… doesn’t fly seriously anymore,” she’s saying when Harry gets back, as he hisses at the front door’s snakes to make them shut silently behind him. “He’ll mess around with Teddy and it’s not as though he _can’t_ use a broom; he just doesn’t…”

“But that’s mad,” Sirius is protesting, and Harry feels nothing but a great sucking well of shame. “He loves flying; he could have gone professional – Prongs, he’s…”

“You did _not_ say that to him,” Hermione snaps, and Harry finds himself slumping to the wall, tipping his head to his shoulder to listen.

“Why would that be so terrible?” asks James, affronted.

Hermione huffs. “Use your imagination,” she suggests to him tartly, as though it’s been a long day.

It’s always been the same, when the days feel long. Hermione will be short, and Harry and Ron will let her be. She’ll come home and take off her shoes, change into jeans and immerse herself in a book or the television. Before Crookshanks died, the old git, Hermione used to use him as an excuse not to get up before tea time. She would sit with her eyes closed, sometimes, and exist, breathing, one hand buried in the cat’s fur.

They buried Crookshanks in the garden, under the tree that was here before Draco, and Harry misses the cat sometimes, around the house.

“Hermione love,” Harry’s mum is saying gently. Firmly. “We’re not trying to cause a fight. We’re trying to work out what upset him.”

It’s a mistake. “If you think that Ron and I sit down with Harry and have long talks about his _feelings_ ,” Hermione declares, “you need rather more help than I can give you.”

This isn’t strictly true, but it’s a good line – and the result is clean silence, prickling and stiff.

It’s Lupin who breaks it, calmly. “How many people were on at him?” he asks, leaving _after the war_ implied.

“All of them,” answers Hermione, because she can’t resist a direct question. Though she’s exaggerating, really.

And Harry can imagine her, standing in front of the floo on the hearthrug, surrounded by Harry’s four foundlings, Luna’s bright flowers on the wall no match for their strange impossibility. “Kreacher,” Harry mumbles into his shoulder, knowing that he’ll be heard. “Tea and an extra biscuit, when Hermione sits down. Thanks.”

“Ron and I wanted him with us, but we had to muddle through without,” she’s explaining. “The Ministry wanted him anywhere that they could see him, and so did the newspapers. The quidditchers wanted him in the air.”

Part of Harry lurches towards the doorway, because it wasn’t like that at all.

“McGonagall wanted him at Hogwarts, but _she_ knew well enough to bide her time.” Hermione finishes bitterly, “I’m certain that Dumbledore was in on it.” She means the painting. “He could always play Harry like a fiddle.” This isn’t what she used to say.

Harry swallows. Inside the parlour, someone snorts, and Harry imagines that it’s Sirius.

“The three of us only ever wanted to put the war behind us,” says Hermione, short-tempered. “Now that _newspaper_ has dragged it all… _Again_ ,” she says, and she’s been trying so hard for years, making friends with Draco even when Harry and Ron were telling her that she was mental. “Harry doesn’t fly because he doesn’t want to,” she concludes. “That should be more than enough explanation.” She blusters, because she knows this is a fudge. “If you give me five minutes to get changed and sit down, I’ll help you find him.”

There’s the sound of movement, so Harry pulls away from the wall. “There’s no need, Hermione,” he says, just as she comes into the hallway.

It makes her jump out of her skin. “Harry, don’t _do_ that,” she complains, looking frazzled. Her brown eyes are sharp, piercing into him. “This is a terrible habit; I thought that you’d come in upstairs.”

Of course, Harry thinks, startling; Hermione will have felt him come home, the same way he felt her, his ears clearing and sharp. The other four aren’t connected to the wards the same way; they don’t feel Harry and the others’ presence. Harry’s so used to it that he forgets.

Which means that Hermione was lying for him – just as she always has done. It’s her own bad habit, really.

“Sorry,” he says, meaning thank you, as always.

“I don’t want you to be _sorry_ ,” Hermione tells him, sighing, the corners of her mouth nonetheless pulling into a conspiratorial grin. “I want you to –”

“What _exactly_ d’you call this, son of mine?” Harry’s mum shouts at him, then, making him jump. She and the others appear in the hallway. “Running off when we’re –”

“Harry –” his dad says, and he seems to be reaching for an apology, or forgiveness.

It itches underneath Harry’s skin. “Just –” Harry cuts himself off. “I said thank you and I meant it,” he manages. It’s possible that he says this meaning sorry.

His mum rears back at his tone, and she looks singularly unimpressed. Hermione rolls her eyes and stomps off up the stairs.

Even now, Harry has to bite his tongue, his chest burning, and it’s exhausting, confronting this feeling again.

His eyes meet Sirius’s, and – instead of more censure, Sirius smirks. His eyes dance, dark.

“What?” Harry demands before he can stop himself.

“Nothing,” he says, goading.

He’s in love with chaos, Harry thinks. He loves chaos; he loves Lupin; he loves Harry’s dad and –

“I had a godson, once,” Sirius confides. “He was as bad at this as you.”

He loves the boy who lived, like everybody else.

Harry stares at him. He stares at his dad, at his mum, at Lupin, whose expression is guarded and shrewd. He doesn’t know what he feels. He draws his wand and disapparates to Draco’s bedroom, breathing, throwing out a spell to lock the door and then throwing his wand to the bedclothes.

He should have done this in the first place, he thinks. Hermione would have covered for him.

* * *

A week before Harry and Draco go on holiday, Harry visits the Royal Academy with Auntie Dromeda, Teddy and Lupin himself. The RA is only a half-hour walk from Grimmauld Place, and it’s become tradition for Harry and Auntie Dromeda to take Teddy to see the Summer Exhibition. Every year, the exhibition displays all sorts of art submitted anonymously by professionals and amateurs alike.

Harry’s seen quite a lot of art, these days, both with Teddy and without him. Grimmauld Place is in walking distance of all the major galleries and there are only so many times that anyone can play Exploding Snap. He looks at the paintings and everything else, he reads the information cards and sometimes he buys the books.

This doesn’t mean that he understands much. Here and now, for example, at the Royal Academy, Harry has no idea what to say when Teddy asks him why someone’s painted a picture of a bucket (“It’s not even a nice bucket!”) or what the mess of formed wood on a plinth is supposed to be (“It’s all burnt up!”).

It’s true that Harry likes the chaos of the exhibition, every year. He likes the different rooms, all painted bright colours and filled to the brim with colourful things to look at, floor to ceiling. He likes that it’s full of people, and that while a good number of the pictures are large and imposing, a greater number are small and approachable, depicting things that he can recognise or words that he can read, or shapes. Shapes and colours.

Auntie Dromeda prefers the National Gallery, but Harry hates the depth of ignorance he feels there, dwarfed by paintings fifteen feet high and two-hundred years old, depicting some scene or other which might be mythical or might be stylised history, the subjects all bearing earnest, sour expressions, much like the people looking at them. There’s never any panel to explain, and Harry would rather try to work out the point being made by the bucket (“It’s _rusty_.”).

This year, somewhere halfway through the Summer Exhibition, Harry finds himself looking at a still life. It’s nothing special, he doesn’t think; the ones in the National are nicer, more complex. It’s a round-bottomed, Mediterranean-blue vase containing a spray of leaves and flowers, sitting next to an orange on a sludgy brown table, against a black background. His eyes are drawn to the flowers most of all, each a puff of long, floppy petals, white against fronds of leaf green, veined and pure. The piece is only the size of a textbook, an unframed canvas.

For some reason, Harry finds, he likes it. He likes looking at it. He likes the round brightness of the orange in contrast with the blue and the flowers in their spidery delicacy. Together, the whole makes him think of simple pleasures, like laughing while he slices a cake, or waking up with Draco’s hair in his nose, the best version of that surprise.

“Are you going to buy it, then?” Lupin asks him.

Harry turns his head, startled out of his thoughts, the noise of the crowd returning to his ears. This must be the first time that he and Lupin have spoken since May, without Teddy, without Draco, without Sirius.

“What?” Harry asks, not having heard the question. “Oh,” he says, realising. “Nah, course not.”

He remembers now that nearly everything submitted to the exhibition is for sale. From what he’s gathered in the past, most pieces go in the first few days, which are in July. Purchased pieces end up with a sticker on their label.

The painting, Harry notices, doesn’t yet have a sticker. _Still life with orange and chrysanthemums_ , it’s called, according to the catalogue.

He even likes the title, Harry realises. It’s informative. _Chrysanthemums,_ that’s what they are.

“Why not?” Lupin’s asking, peering to read over Harry’s shoulder. The question isn’t a challenge, merely mild and interested. It’s not a come-on, Harry tells himself. It’s kind. “That’s not extortionate,” Lupin carries on, reading. “Quite cheap, really, for a painting.”

“It’s pointless,” Harry points out. The price is nearly a week’s salary, if he’s got the conversion right. He would have thought that Lupin of all people would realise that this is too much to spend on something pointless. “What would I do with it?”

Lupin grins, huffing out a breath as though Harry’s said something amusing. “Put it on the wall, I imagine.” His eyes are warm and it’s unnerving. “Look at it from time to time.”

“Oh, I’d never…” Harry tells him, looking at the painting again.

“You’ve been looking at it for five minutes already.”

“Sorry,” Harry says, distracting himself and turning back to the crowded gallery, trying to see where the rest of their group has gone. “Is Teddy bored, then?”

Lupin is looking at him reprovingly, and Harry isn’t sure why. He acts as though Harry hasn’t said anything. “I read a book about Dutch painting, once,” he begins, nodding back to the canvas on the wall. “Can’t recall most of it. I believe that oranges are supposed to signify prosperity, because traditionally they were difficult to come by. The equivalent of a really nice box of chocolates, which you can only afford when things are going well.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, because he knows this. It’s not Lupin’s belief; it’s true. The connection has always made sense: Harry knows what it’s like to go without fruit, to taste an orange wedge at school because the dinner lady’s caught on that his packed lunch wasn’t packed, so she’s snuck him at the end of the queue for sausage pie and carrots and chips and syrup sponge, the fruit pot an extra because it’s 12:35 and there are spares.

It happened once.

“Don’t ask me what the chrysanthemums mean,” Lupin goes on, no matter that Harry hasn’t. He’s not sure what the man is trying to do. “White is often purity or innocence. Most flowers have positive meanings – love and devotion and the like. All doomed to fade.”

“Yeah,” Harry tells him again, not sure if he should reveal that he knows this too, though he can’t remember from where. “Sometimes there’s an insect to remind you,” he agrees.

“I’ve – never liked the insects,” Lupin says, glancing at Harry as though he’s unnerved to have been answered back.

Harry shrugs, looking to the painting. “I think I’d rather see it, than wonder when it was coming.” He leans closer, and there’s a shadow, he thinks, under the rim of the blue vase. It might be a beetle. Harry’s been seeing beetles everywhere.

“But it needn’t be there at all,” Lupin suggests, a little forcefully. “It’s a painting; it’s not going to change.”

“Everything changes,” Harry dismisses.

This gets no reply, so Harry turns his head. Lupin’s expression is closed. The urge sits in Harry’s throat to ask if he’s all right, because he doesn’t look it, and it’s been coming back to Harry for months now, how for all the years he knew Lupin, he was perpetually falling apart at the seams. The summer before fifth year – he seemed happy then, and maybe at Bill and Fleur’s, when Teddy was born, but otherwise…

Glancing, Lupin’s amber eyes meet Harry’s. He looks away. “This is my first time inside the RA,” he comes out with abruptly.

Harry pulls back, trying to read him. He would ask if he was all right, Harry thinks, if they’d ever had that sort of relationship.

“You didn’t need to buy me a ticket,” Lupin goes on, looking around the busy room and up to the curves of the gilded, domed ceiling.

“Don’t be stupid,” Harry says without thinking.

Again, Lupin looks at him, guarded. He’s giving Harry every cue in the world to let it drop.

Despite himself, Harry turns back to the painting, feeling like a scolded child. “Like Hermione said…” he tries to recover. “There’s enough coming into Gringotts to support a family of ten, living modestly. And – I’ve got a salary on top of that.”

There’s a pause, but somehow, then, with this, Harry’s lost an argument. “In that case,” Lupin suggests lightly, his tone ever so sly, “one imagines that you might be able to afford a few hundred quid on a painting.”

He doesn’t sound teacherly and he doesn’t sound fatherly. It feels like a come-on, because Harry forgets what’s left after this.

He’s an enabler, Lupin, Harry thinks later, in any case, when he’s handing over his card and his details and trying to explain to the man behind the desk why he’s made the choice that he has.

“I’ve just moved,” is what comes out of him, with what he fears may be a blush. It’s a terrible explanation. “The walls are all empty.” He fears that he may have bought himself a birthday present.

* * *

The trip to the Royal Academy is a relief, because Harry spends the beginning of August avoiding his parents. He knows that they’ve become friends with George and Angelina, so it makes sense that they’re friendly with George and Angelina’s friends – Lee and Alicia and Katie, most of all – but it’s still a bit much. Alicia has been married to Justin Finch-Fletchley since 2003, in one of the more heart-warming match-ups from the DA, Neville reckons, so he’s part of the group too, and what’s that about?

They likely know him better than Harry does, by this point. Justin’s rarely seen because he works for a muggle law firm, and Harry’s not around much to do the seeing.

In the years immediately following the war, Justin took A Levels as well as NEWTs and studied History at muggle university. According to what he says, essay-writing and critical thinking are transferable skills between both worlds, and the Hogwarts curriculum provides excellent training in both. Hermione tends to end up flustered whenever they’ve been out with him, which Harry finds entirely amusing, even as it makes Ron scoff and snap

(“I don’t think that I could ever be so _political_ ,” she says, which is a joke. “The things he comes out with, right there in the Leaky Cauldron. The _nerve_.”

“He’s a boring-arsed twat in a suit,” Ron responds, maturely. “Who cares if he’s working for muggles?”

A sigh. “And this is why I love you, Ron,” Hermione finishes, rolling her eyes, which makes Draco laugh. It takes Harry a minute to suss out what she means.).

Justin’s undergraduate dissertation, as Harry’s been told, was on nineteenth-century trade law and about as dry as floo powder. His day-to-day work has something to do with putting things on ships, which Harry doesn’t understand. He’s not Harry’s type, let’s say. If it can be said that he has one.

After Sirius’s conviction is formally quashed, there’s a huge run of press. Grimmo stonewalls the _Prophet_ , and Harry doesn’t think more about it. His parents, on the other hand, find themselves extremely busy, and Harry doesn’t think _much_ about it until one day, at seven o’clock in the morning, Hermione’s otter patronus switches through the door to Draco’s bedroom and tells Harry to turn on the radio or get down to the library _right now_.

Harry’s dad and Justin Finch-Fletchley are on Lee Jordan’s radio show.

 _“If that newspaper comes anywhere near us…”_ James Potter is saying, his voice deep and important and humourless, unfamiliar. _“If it so much as mentions Sirius’s name or prints a photograph of our son, we will sue. If it dares attribute a quotation to me, to my wife, to anyone from our family, we will sue. For three decades of libel, Lee, we will sue them for every knut they’re worth. And we’ll win,”_ he says, in an off-hand way which makes a laugh bloom in Harry’s chest at the daring. Presumably in everyone else’s too. Harry keeps his contained, the feeling sour.

 _“For those who’ve just tuned in,”_ now says Lee, _“you’re listening to the WWN Breakfast Show with Lee Jordan, and I’m here today with James Potter, Order of Merlin, First Class. We’ve another guest in the studio, Justin Finch-Fletchley, also Order of Merlin, as it turns out, associate and wizarding liaison at Mansfield & Swift. He’s going to tell us a little more about the Daily Prophet’s legal position. Am I right in thinking, Justin, that libel isn’t mentioned in wizarding law?”_

 _“Yes, Lee, that is correct,”_ Justin says, rather pompously. He and Ernie Macmillan are good friends still, Harry’s heard from George, though Harry always forgets where Ernie’s ended up. The Ministry somewhere. _“However, it is a mistake often made to think that because no wizarding law exists, a wizard may act with impunity. Wizarding law, in Britain at least, is a set of byelaws and bye-amendments to the law of England and Wales, or else Scotland. The situation for Irish wizarding law is more complicated, because of the community we maintained even after the Republic of Ireland was established in 1948…”_

_“Mm, after Grindelwald?”_

_“In part, but not entirely –”_

_“How interesting. Let’s get back to the Daily Prophet…”_

“We’ve sent the _Prophet_ a letter,” says Harry’s mum, looking serious, sat in the library at the desk, wrapped up in her pink dressing gown with the radio on. Lupin is there too, listening and silent by the door, his arms crossed.

Sirius is out, almost certainly as a dog.

“Why have you done this?” Harry finds himself asking, not exactly sure what he’s referring to, or why he feels so weird. Lupin leaves the room, and Harry’s eyes follow him. “You shouldn’t have done anything. It’ll only make things worse.” He’s certain that this is what the odd feeling in his stomach is telling him.

“We have to do _something_ , Harrymo,” his mum says, her brows knitting, her hair in a plait.

Harry leaves before he can shout at her. He’s being punished, he thinks, for all the times when he said the same thing.

Jittering, he makes his way back to the flat, where Draco is curled up under the duvet at an angle, one pillow pulled down, his face slumped into the nook between it and the others. He’s not asleep; Harry can tell by the way he’s clenching his hand.

“I don’t understand what they’re doing,” Harry tries to explain. “I don’t understand… How am I supposed to keep them –?”

Eyes closed and not moving, Draco responds, eventually. “We don’t have to go,” he says, gravelly, as though he’s long seen this coming, all while Harry paces in front of the bed, not exactly ranting about what a stupid idea this was of his dad’s, him and his stupid friends, and Justin Finch-Fletchley, whom Harry barely knows, so –

Draco’s talking about their trip to France. “It’s our holiday,” Harry tells him, stopping on the rug. “It’s your birthday present.” Which he bought for himself, but Harry will be buying the wine, because it’s for Grimmo. Or he might be – it’s confusing. Their money’s all mixed up these days.

Draco said on Harry’s birthday that he’ll buy him a souvenir, but Harry has a plan to make him forget about that.

“Why wouldn’t we go?” Harry returns to the point.

Silent for a moment, Draco breathes out, turns his head and opens his eyes one at a time, bleary and careful. “You’re worried about them,” he says in the end, surrounded by pillows.

“Who?” Harry throws back.

“The four of them.” Draco’s tone suggests that Harry is being unforgivably stupid. “Your parents. Lily and James for putting themselves in harm’s way, Lupin for checking out and Sirius for buggering off when you need him. Your problem with Finch-Fletchley, well…”

“I –” Harry’s stomach turns over, and he’s not sure what to say. He doesn’t feel twenty-eight.

“It’s perplexing,” Malfoy goes on, sounding amused by himself, not elaborating about Justin, and Harry wishes that he would. “You seem to have done a complete about-turn since Easter. I’m waiting for the request that we install them at the end of our bed.” He glances down at the breadth of grey between them.

It – would be a lot easier, Harry thinks. “There’s enough room,” he observes, almost entirely joking.

With a groan of complaint, Malfoy rolls over and spindles out of bed to the floor. “No,” he says simply, meeting Harry’s eyes.

The curtains are closed, so there’s no way for anyone outside to see as Malfoy stalks over the rug, throws an elbow over Harry’s shoulder, idly, presses their faces together and snogs him thoroughly. It feels obscene anyway. Harry’s not sure that he’ll ever get used to doing this in the morning.

And he can’t stop his thoughts about beetles, even as his hands dig under t-shirt to skin. The windows are open behind the curtains, because Harry can’t sleep without fresh air at this time of year, and he’s more than happy to keep Draco warm. There needs to be some sort of magical window netting, he thinks, built into the wards.

He needs to do work on the wards, full stop. He needs –

He needs –

“You’ve been having nightmares all week,” Draco tells him calmly, once Harry is thoroughly distracted. It’s an invitation to explain why.

Dazed, Harry stares into the pits of his eyes, the stone-vein facets of their colour. His hands have slid to Draco’s ribs, high up under his t-shirt where he can feel him breathing deeply in and out. “I’m in the cave,” Harry admits, ducking his head and frowning because he doesn’t understand it. “It’s always the cave, but Dumbledore’s not there. I don’t know who is. I keep forcing them to drink and drink and drink…”

“As I said, we don’t have to go,” Draco repeats, his arms reassuring weights on Harry’s shoulders. The flicker of emotion in his eyes is concern.

“What is it, really, that can happen?” Harry asks him, because he doesn’t know the answer. His fingers are jittering. He makes fists and wraps his arms around Draco’s back. “What would staying stop?”

“That’s a better question,” Draco points out. He nudges his face into Harry’s like a big cat, as though he fancies him and wants him to calm down, even if he knows better than to suggest it. He can imagine a hundred things going wrong, Harry’s well aware. Presumably he’s occluding them. He occludes a lot of stuff.

“I’ve never been on holiday,” Harry admits, looking at the grey bed, rumpled and huge. He keeps his voice low because he doesn’t want it to carry. “I’ve never left the country.” He’s seen more of Great Britain than a lot of people, but he’s never seen anywhere else, apart from on maps and apart from the island hut that the Dursleys took him to in a storm.

He was going to swim to the Atlantic with the merpeople, this summer, but that’s been put on hold. He hasn’t had time to go and see them. It’s annoying, because he’s been wanting to make the swim for years.

“Would you like to go to France?” Draco asks lightly, and Harry loves him again for not commenting on the sad, hidebound nature of Harry’s existence. His fingers rake into Harry’s hair.

Shutting his eyes for a moment, Harry can only think of a time in his life when he accepted that snogging Ginny would be the sum of his whole life’s experience. “Please,” he admits, and it feels dirty to say it.

“Let me take you away,” Draco pretends to seduce him, nudging their noses together until Harry kisses him. “We’ll drink a lot of wine in the sun, we’ll eat cake for breakfast, we’ll try out at least three different beds… Yes?” he suggests, looking Harry in the eye.

With a shuddering breath, Harry tells him, “Yeah, all right.”

* * *

Now, some would say that Harry lets himself be led. Maybe this is what happens, when he agrees to go on holiday with Draco despite every warning in his gut.

But there is evidence against this line of argument. Principally, there is what happens in the car park of the car-hire place, when Harry and Draco finally escape from number 12.

When it happens, Harry thinks that he should have seen it coming, but he doesn’t.

This makes sense. Draco wants to hire a car, Harry’s been told; Draco wants to drive around France. Draco is Draco, so why should Harry doubt him? He’s a qualified member of the Department of Mysteries; he broke killers into Hogwarts at the age of sixteen. He has _not_ raised four people from the dead, but he certainly hasn’t done them any harm.

He should be famous. Harry’s told anyone who’ll listen. He’s told Ron and Hermione dozens of times (“ _Yes_ , Harry, but these things take time…”

“Mate, you’re famous and you hate it.”

“I’m famous for a load of rubbish –”).

On the other hand, there is the clear warning offered by one Teddy Lupin.

Because they leave on a Saturday. The morning brings Harry to Brentwood, as always, and he explains the plan to Teddy and Auntie Dromeda. It’s only a brief breakfast visit; Lupin has skipped it after the exhibition last week. Draco is fussing over the packing.

“Yeah, we’re going away till next Saturday,” Harry says, nodding, very cool. “Draco wants to hire a car, drive around a bit, buy some wine.”

“No Ron and Hermione?” asks Auntie Dromeda.

“Er, no?”

Auntie Dromeda’s eyebrows rise practically to her hairline, sitting at the table in the living room. Harry’s just finished a bowl of Coco Pops, like Teddy. Auntie Dromeda’s had muesli. And it’s ridiculous, because she knows full well that Harry and Draco are together; Harry’s been certain of this for ages.

Looking between her and Harry, Teddy’s tawny eyes are bright. “Cousin Draco’ll be driving a _car?_ ” he exclaims, aghast, and it makes Harry laugh, at the time.

“Yeah,” Harry tells him, and Teddy gives him a look.

At the time, Harry thinks that he looks like his dad, but he doesn’t say so. Teddy was clearly disappointed when Harry emerged on his own from the floo. Lupin’s excuse was something about Sirius, and Harry didn’t want to start his holiday by getting into it with him.

In France, later, Cousin Draco and Harry’s falsified licences give them no trouble at all, and Harry’s high on the fact that the portkey hasn’t killed them.

Being falsified, the licences aren’t strictly legal, but this shouldn’t be a problem as long as Harry and Draco don’t break anything they can’t fix. They take the keys and they find the right parking bay and they put their bags in the boot before climbing into the front. Draco takes the seat behind the wheel.

It’s been over a decade since Harry was last in a car, which is likely why it feels surreal. Everything seems more electric than it should be, chrome instead of plastic. Also – ruddy Malfoy has spent far too much money and they’re currently sitting inside a black, soft-top BMW with buff leather seats.

It’s been threatening to make Harry laugh since he first saw the thing. As he does up his seatbelt, he finds himself tittering. “You’re such a prat,” he says, the smell of the leather making him grin. He doesn’t belong in this car; he doesn’t know what he’s doing here, besides following Malfoy, and who saw that coming? It’s an adventure. Everyone’s speaking French and the signs are in French and the air smells slightly different from London. “We only needed, like, a hatchback.”

But Malfoy doesn’t reply, Harry’s seducer. His hands are resting at ten and two on the steering wheel, and after seconds of looking, like the tick of a watch, Harry sees them twitch. He’s staring out of the windscreen, out beyond the car park to the road, and his expression is more distant than that.

“What is it?” asks Harry, pausing.

“I’m going to kill us,” says Malfoy, very certain, repenting, the quiet inside the car audible around his words. There’s no way that it’s a ploy. “I’m going to kill all the muggles.”

And Harry should have seen it coming.

The solution seems obvious, unavoidable, already decided, though Harry doesn’t know when. He squeezes the button to undo his seatbelt. “All right, get out,” he says, reaching over to touch Draco’s elbow, make him look – which he does, his expression blank and cold. “I’ll drive. You can tell me what to do.”

With uncanny precision, Draco nods, and Harry swaps seats without giving it a thought.

As it turns out, Harry finds, driving isn’t difficult. He takes the car twice around the car park, pretending to be lost, making faces as though he is very, very lost – while Draco snipes at him about mirrors and furiously casts protective shields, charms to make them extra visible. Something to pinpoint their location inside a thick, large-print road atlas. This spell is one of Harry’s, and there’s another of Hermione’s, to make physically real a two-second bubble around them, just like it says in the manuals.

Harry lets him get on with it.

Their hotel is in the middle of nowhere, apparently, and the roads mostly find them on their own. They’re in Champagne for the next couple of days (“Where else would we start?”); they have to spend a few minutes on the motorway to get out of Reims, but Harry doesn’t think about it.

It’s a lot like flying a hippogriff, driving on the motorway, lurching and stiff, the traffic dense. Harry makes it his aim not to crash; he holds their position resolutely in with the lorries. It’s not like anyone’s shooting curses at him. He’s not worrying about getting anywhere, or being seen, or the charms going wrong. It’s easy to steer off at their junction.

Half an hour later, Harry’s just enjoying himself. The car’s an automatic (“Girly American vehicles,” Uncle Vernon used to say), which is likely why things are so easy, but it feels nice, being borne down a road, surrounded by fields – quite often vines, like Hermione’s wand. The route is marked out by trees in stately lines, as though the countryside is a great formal garden which he and Draco are driving to see. The sun is shining and the sky is clean blue, cut with friendly-looking white.

They could be flying, Harry thinks.

“Did you plan this?” he asks Draco, suspicious.

“Plan what?” asks Draco sullenly, hunched and alert with his wand in his hand and the atlas in his lap, his seatbelt dark beige and strange across his black muggle shirt. He catches Harry looking, his eyes panicked and flashing. “Keep your eyes on the road!”

Harry sighs and eases off the accelerator, looking ahead at what’s only a gentle curving track. “This feels a lot like flying,” he says. He glances to his mirrors, up and left like Draco’s told him – up and right it would be in a car back at home. He’s basically looking for bludgers. “You’ve stitched me up into flying.”

He knows it isn’t true, but Harry says it anyway, if only to wind Draco up and maybe snap him out of his mood. He can’t cuddle him or cast spells on him; he’s driving a car.

“You know full well,” Draco tells him, “that I expect to be a prodigy at every task I set my mind to.” His tone is partly distracted, and Harry knows that his eyes are on the road, his own mirror. “This is, as ever, emphatically humiliating, both as I am forced to recognise my own shortcomings and as you prove yourself naturally superior.”

Harry laughs, flicking down the indicator because Draco told him that it was the third turning on the left, two turnings ago, and one’s coming up, going by the trees and the way that the fields break.

“Oh yes,” Draco says, a twitch of his fingers on the map in Harry’s peripheral vision. “Turn left.”

“I’m not doing anything that you couldn’t do,” Harry points out, because he’s barely doing anything at all, checking that the road’s clear and slowing for the turn, the forces familiar and the brake pedal easy to use. The car’s heavy, he’s figured out, and it steers from the front. It needs to be going slow to make tight turns smooth and controlled.

“You are a very frustrating man,” is all Draco tells him as they turn. It’s Harry’s best one yet.

The fields open up here, the trees falling away and in the distance there are farm houses, big and small, though none of them are castles like Draco’s promised that their hotel might as well be. Harry loves castles, their thick walls and turrets. He feels a grin steal broad across his face; he wants to put the roof down. He feels far from home, but as though he knows the way back.

“Thank you for driving,” Draco cuts into these thoughts, bizarrely, as though there’s something to be grateful for. “I don’t mean to be difficult –”

“You’re not difficult,” Harry interrupts, because this train of thought needs to be shut down. “We’re all difficult,” he corrects, to something more accurate.

“Even so –”

“Ron’s difficult,” Harry points out, following the road. “Hermione’s difficult. I’m definitely difficult. Maybe there are easy people out there, but I don’t know who they are. Where am I going now?”

Promptly, Draco gives him perfect directions. It’s maybe another five minutes on this road, which ends by feeding into one larger, taking them right, and they’ll follow this for half an hour, if the traffic’s moving. Ideally, Harry should look for signs to somewhere with a name the sort of French that he’ll have to ask Draco to spell. He doesn’t want Reims or Paris or this place or that place because they’re going a little out of the way.

From where, Harry doesn’t ask. He also doesn’t point out that they’ve just _come_ from Reims, so obviously they’re going somewhere else.

When he’s like this, Draco likes to cross the Ts, state the obvious, and that’s all he means by it, Harry tells himself (“The door’s that way!”).

“Ron and Hermione aren’t difficult,” Draco finishes, back to the point. “Mirrors,” he adds, fussing.

Harry rolls his eyes, but he checks them. Nothing. “Ron and Hermione are familiar,” he says. “You’ve joined a well-oiled machine.”

Draco doesn’t reply to this, and Harry watches as he relaxes, in the corner of his eye. “As for you – you’re very easy,” Draco says eventually, flirting lightly, and he gives Harry a look, now clearly trusting him to drive them.

As the road rolls on, Harry looks out at the landscape, simple and lovely, trees in the distance. The last of the lingering tension from the car park unwinds, and Harry keeps his eyes on the road. He glances at the mirrors every now and then, but the world is bludger-free.

Settling into the quiet, Harry wonders if Draco even credits it, that he conducted the entire transaction to hire this car in a language that Harry doesn’t understand and can’t be taught. They always try a little, whenever there’s a do at Shell Cottage, but nothing goes in.

He wishes that he could learn to drive a car every day. It’s fun. “You know, Malfoy,” he says, because he thinks that he can get away with it, here. “Sometimes it feels weird that I’m in love with you.”

Draco jumps, but the tension doesn’t come back. “So you’ve said,” he accepts.

“But I haven’t said,” Harry corrects. He doesn’t think he ever has. “And that’s the point,” he carries on. “It isn’t weird. This is great. I’m having a great time. No one’s ever taken me on holiday.”

“I’ve not taken you on holiday,” Draco scoffs, sitting up and pulling at his seatbelt, caught in a glove of buff leather like something small. “I’m forcing you chauffeur an investment trip –”

“Would you even know how to sell what’s downstairs?” Harry asks, to see what he’ll do. He’s heard Draco and Sirius debate this. It was at the start of the summer, when Sirius was in a more buoyant mood.

“A shopping trip, if nothing else,” now Draco says cuttingly, aggressive, and it’s entertaining, all these years on. “You don’t even drink wine, if there’s a choice. You know nothing about it –”

“I’m not fussy,” Harry says to wind him up even more, containing his grin, his eyes looking for the junction at the end of the road. Oh – there it is. “I’m having fun.” He aims for blithe. “Just tell me what I need to know to have an opinion.”

“You are infuriating,” Draco says, and from the tone of his voice he's in a state. “I cannot fucking stand you. Why –”

“Did you book a big bed at this castle?” Harry asks, not sure if he wants to be there or here or drinking champagne, certain that all three lie in his future.

“Fuck,” Draco spits, as though he’s thinking about it. “The biggest they had,” he confirms. “You and your fucking fetish –”

“D’you think they’ll know, at the desk?”

“That we intend to fuck on it?” Draco says bluntly.

And Harry laughs and corrects him, “That I’m in love with you.” Because that’s something no one ever told him.

The road’s coming up and there are cars on it. Harry aims not to crash, and keeps his movements smooth, slowing down.

“How am I supposed to know?” Draco demands. He’s not answering Harry’s question. “I gave them both our names, that we’re both of us _monsieur_. They’ve no idea who we are, it’s not illegal and we’ll be paying them a lot of money. They’ve no reason to complain –”

“I didn’t ask if you thought they’d complain,” Harry points out, as Draco and Hermione’s charms start kicking in.

Pressure on the two-second bubble is like things coming close to Harry’s body. It’s just like being in the air.

He didn’t think about it, before. He was on the motorway, feeling the pedals and the steering and torque. He’s grown used to those now. It was like flying a hippogriff, but here…

He doesn’t freeze. It’s not like he’s having a breakdown. The fact is, Harry doesn’t like it. He hasn’t played quidditch in a long time and he doesn’t want to play it now.

He wants to stop. He wants to take his hands off the wheel, open the door and walk away.

“Get these charms off me,” Harry says, not taking the gap in the traffic. Another car’s coming and it makes the air move around him, press on his bristling arms. He can feel the eyes of the other drivers, watching and expecting his move.

He could go at any time, he knows. There’s a car coming, getting closer, but if he had to, he could get out in front of it, slam the accelerator, feel the speed in his chest, escape by an inch.

He’d have to trust his instincts, but they’re clearly on his side, in this car, and he can see how fast the other cars are moving –

“ _Malfoy,_ ” Harry says, shutting his eyes and tightening his grip.

“What?” Malfoy’s asking, not reacting.

There’s no reason to wait, Harry thinks; they’re all mocking him; he should just –

“The bubble charm, Malfoy,” Harry swears, feeling the car swoop by, another and another, the rush of them all over his body, his hands on the wheel. “Take it _off_.”

“It’s not on you; it’s the car –”

“I don’t care!” Harry interrupts, not moving, gritting every muscle he has and looking down at the steering wheel.

“Merlin…”

Too slowly, Harry thinks, Draco counterspells the charm and Harry’s sweating, hot, sitting at the junction with thankfully no cars behind him. He blinks. The sky is cloudy blue and the fields are green. The stately lines of trees are clean and straight; there’s a gentle breeze outside. Shade is falling dappled on the windscreen.

Taking a deep breath, which he releases, Harry’s ears tune into the sound of the indicator. He watches the cars, he judges his distances, he’s cautious, and he turns easily into a gap, pressing the accelerator gently to catch up with the traffic. It’s the simplest thing he’s ever done. His heart is thudding violently.

“I can figure it out on my own,” he comes up with, feeling idiotic, ashamed, adrenaline fading to leave him feeling cold. “I mean – sorry,” he manages, because he’s twenty-eight years old and he fears that he sounds like Uncle Vernon, swearing while driving a car. “Thank you,” he remembers awkwardly.

The air inside the BMW is prickling with uncertainty, and Harry feels terrified, for a moment, that it’s going to be like this all week, and that’ll be that, because of him. Three months instead of a week. It won’t be a surprise.

“It’s not you, all right?” Harry insists, not looking away from the car ahead of him, the cars coming towards them, drawing close and swooping past. “It’s –” Draco knows what it is, Harry thinks. He doesn’t need it spelled out. Everyone knows it after Harry’s birthday, the disaster. They’ve just been talking about how much Harry loves him, haven’t they, so Draco must know –

He goes up in the air with Teddy, Harry counts off in his head; he uses brooms when he needs a quick mode of transport. He doesn’t have a phobia – he just doesn’t…

Harry’s not sure how to describe what he doesn’t do. The first time he went up with Ginny after the war, someone put a picture in the paper and he didn’t recognise the image as himself, that teenager laughing, his hair cut and his face clean, that beautiful girl swooping around him and making his head turn, her hair bright red-gold.

It was disturbing, Harry found, after everything.

For a long time in France, Draco says nothing. It’s not necessarily bad, when he does this. He’s patient and he’s measured and he’s controlled. These are virtues. He lets Harry come to him; he lets Harry walk away.

The diadem would have burned in the fire, Harry sometimes lets himself think. He could have left it, and it would have burned.

And yet it puts Harry on tenterhooks, Draco’s silence, no matter what. “Will you say something?” he demands.

“Mm,” Draco begins in the end.

“What?” Harry asks him, impatient, glancing at his hawkish face. At the mirrors. Back to the car in front.

“Nothing.” Draco’s laughing at him now, and Harry doesn’t know whether he feels sick or relieved. He sounds wry, calculating, and Harry doesn’t know why he thinks that no one could love him. “You are absurd,” he comes out with. “The idea that you will never fly again, Harry Potter…”

Harry thinks that he hates that name. _Harry Potter_. The run of it. “Well, what if I don’t?” Harry asks Draco, though he knows that he only sounds grumpy, too relieved to stay angry.

“I refuse to believe it and no one can make me,” Draco says petulantly, his tone brisk. His gaze his sharp, and Harry shivers, stealing a glance and doing penance by checking his mirrors. “I’m being tortured with the cheap muggle substitute, and it’s all I can do to sit tight.”

“OK,” Harry says, trying hard not to grin. “Though you’ll never convince me that this car was cheap.”

“Yes,” agrees Draco, rather sly, and the thought makes Harry laugh, that he might have planned this all along. Maybe the idea was to ease Harry into it. “Will you go fast at some point?” he asks nicely, as though he hasn’t always been terrified of cars. As though he trusts Harry with the risk, which isn’t something he’s ever done before. “Maybe on the way down to Lyon?”

“If you like,” Harry says despite himself. There’s a flutter of excitement in his heart at the thought. “Once I’ve had some practice,” he insists.

Draco’s giving him a look. It’s so easy, when they’re alone.

“I need practice,” Harry insists, no matter how boring it sounds. “And I’d have thought that you’d want a go,” he moves on quickly, feeling relief crack through his own expression.

“No, I much prefer being a passenger,” Draco says decisively, lying about something.

Harry glances at him. Draco’s put his wand back up his sleeve, and he’s feeling up the trim on the door with an appreciative hand that Harry would rather prefer on his leg. Anywhere. Particular places. “I dunno what you mean,” Harry says, turning back to the road, watching for signs.

“How unfortunate,” Draco tells him, light with promise. He’s never been a passenger in his life.

Harry finds himself tittering, and he reaches out to squeeze his wrist.

It makes Draco jump, the map escaping his lap with a clatter. “Hands on the wheel!” he demands. And then, map retrieved, he starts tinkering with the radio.

* * *

They return the car in Marseille, though they don’t spend any time there. The last day is a single long drive with no time for lunch before the portkey. “We’ll come back another year,” Draco promises, and Harry wonders if it would be dickish to buy himself a BMW, because he doesn’t like handing back the keys. He worries that it’s the sort of thing his dad would do. He can only imagine Ron’s face.

Draco hasn’t bought a souvenir that Harry’s seen, also, so –

The portkey returns them to Grimmo’s drawing room, where they’re met by too many people and a heavy, dread-filled atmosphere.

The chill of it sweeps through Harry to his fingertips, familiar. It’s only been a week, but the car’s top came down with a button. It’s turned out that he tans as an adult, and his arms are a definite bronze.

The room looks gloomy, because Malfoy’s been charming the lenses in Harry’s glasses dark green as a joke – a useful joke, with UV protection. Taking off the glasses now, Harry flicks his wand to take out the colour, his stomach sinking as he returns them to his face.

“What’s happened?” he asks as his mum draws him into a hug, warm and strange and small.

“It’s good to have you home, Harrypop,” his mum says, her hand smoothing up and down his arm. Her green eyes seem to pierce straight through him. “Did you have a nice time?”

Harry ducks his head and looks away, taking in the room. Sirius and his dad are having a silent, glancing conversation. Hermione and Ron look less tired, though Hermione looks – different somehow? Harry can’t place it.

Malfoy’s standing at his shoulder and Harry feels overly aware of the closeness between them, less an invisible thread than something crocheted or knitted, tangible, visible, surely, to everyone. His hand is reaching to take hold of Malfoy’s wrist, Harry realises, and he has to force himself to hold it by his side.

“Where’s Lupin?” Malfoy asks, forgetting that he only speaks when spoken to, as though the last week has broken the habit.

“Moony –” says Harry’s dad, breathing in and breathing out, shaking his head and vaguely waving a hand, at a loss.

No, Harry thinks.

“We don’t know,” explains Harry’s mum, frowning seriously. “No one’s seen him all week. He’s missing.”

Missing, Harry hears. _Missing –_

And the thing is, Harry thinks to himself, he _did_ see this coming.

He can’t breathe.

“Harrio –” Harry’s mum squeezes his shoulder. He feels entirely lost, somewhere down a tunnel. Green eyes are bright in his vision like lamps. “Did he say anything to you? He told Padfoot that he was going with you to Teddy’s.”

It was a lie, Lupin’s stuff about Sirius. Perfectly designed to put Harry off.

The house feels different without him. Emptier. Wrong. He and Malfoy should’nt’ve… Why did he –

“No,” Harry tells his mum. He wasn’t told anything; he –

Harry’s eyes find Sirius’s. His dad’s. They both look angry. Drawn and tired and angry.

And this is Harry’s fault, Harry can accept. He never should have gone away. The problem is that Lupin’s been much too good-looking, since he came back, and Harry’s been imagining what it would’ve been like to have him as a dad, and those two things don’t go together –

“We’ve never been close,” Harry tells his mum.

Her green eyes are distraught, glazed with tears, and Harry recognises them as his own.

And then –

“ _Why_ would you say that?” Sirius explodes at him. For once, or maybe like once before, his expression is hard and spiteful, and it makes Harry blink, heart in his throat.

It feels like a betrayal. It feels like everything Harry’s dreaded.

Because – it’s clear that this isn’t Sirius, not really. This isn’t Sirius at all (“You let me call you John.”).

Or – that’s not quite right. It seems clear, more accurately, maybe less, that Sirius Black is someone whom Harry never knew, who never knew him. So there’s no way for the person he remembers to come back to him from the dead.

“Padfoot…” someone is warning – 

– but Harry doesn’t need anyone else’s protection. He feels hot and angry at the very thought of having it. “Because it’s true,” he tells whoever the man is in front of him.

“How is it _true_ –?”

“Er; I say what I mean and I mean what I say?” Harry comes out with.

Eyes narrow and focused, the man who isn’t Sirius glares at him, stopped short. He’s not reminiscing about his godson anymore.

“I mean, what’s your definition of close?” Harry asks, pushing, heart hammering. He shrugs. “ _Hello Harry,_ ” he quotes the words that Lupin never said. “ _You’ve never met me in your life, but I was best friends with your dad. Oh no, don’t worry, let me teach you for half a year before mentioning it. Yeah, and by the way, I’m shagging your godfather._ ” Harry’s glaring at the man, who hasn’t moved. “ _Never mind; he’s dead now. I’ll let you get on. I mean, Dumbledore, he’ll look after you –_ ”

The man’s eyes burn as he steps forward. “Dumbledore –” he begins.

But Harry interrupts him. “Don’t you _ever_ blame Dumbledore for the fact that you lied to me.”

As he glares and as he’s glared at, Harry couldn’t say what difference it would have made, to have known, to have been told. He would have followed Sirius anywhere at fifteen, whoever he was – and it’s his own fault, almost certainly, for not catching on, for never catching on about anyone fancying anyone, but he catches those things now and he won’t blamed for this, he won’t go back, not to that time when he was so ignorant about the way the world worked.

He only wanted to go on one _fucking_ holiday.

Grimmo’s drawing room is huge – the house is castle-like and huge – but standing here, Harry feels trapped, unbearably trapped, the way he felt trapped in Dumbledore’s office on that unbearable day, with Phineas Nigellus giving him shit and knowing that he was to blame, being told that the only alternative was Sirius himself.

“You know what, actually?” Harry says, glaring at the man –

And Harry knows that wanting to have known isn’t fair. He doesn’t feel as though he’s existing in his body, because that body belongs to Harry Potter, and Harry Potter isn’t him. The man that he swears at, besides, is nothing but a fantasy in black jeans, caught like a stain against golden yellow walls, haughty and handsome the way that he is in Hagrid’s old album upstairs. Harry hates him, in this moment, for not being gaunt and for not having grey hair, always laughing and never acting tired and short, the way that Harry feels all the time; never sounding like a half-feral man in a cave, starving on a diet of rats. He hates him for being so wrong and for never coming back _before_ , when Harry needed him, and –

“Fuck you,” Harry swears, in the end. “Fuck you, Sirius.”

“ _Harry_ ,” Hermione is saying first –

– but Harry doesn’t care that there are other people here. His eyes are on those opposite, far away, their smoke, their blaze of indignation when whoever this man is has no right to it. “I gave you everything I had,” Harry says clearly, pulling this accusation out of nowhere, because right now he needs a weapon. He knows that this one will hurt. It feels like he’s slicing open his own chest, the blade cutting his hands. “What did you give me?”

The man standing by the wall says nothing, staring at him, almost looking surprised. He’s standing here in the Black-family drawing room, but the walls are yellow-gold, the curtains green, the sofas tan, though no one’s sitting down. This is Harry’s favourite room of Hermione’s, and this man hates it. He’s always out. He doesn’t like to be in. He’s a _shit_ , Harry tells himself.

“I had to cope with your recklessness,” Harry counts off, burning his feelings until they’re all gone. Of course Lupin would leave, he thinks to himself. This place is like living in hell. “Your hard drinking… Your impossible _desire_ –” And here Harry waves his hand vaguely through the air, dark hair and glasses in his vision before his eyes skip away from them, because fuck if he can deal with them right now. “– to ride again with your bestest best mate. You could’ve got me into bed if you’d asked; I’m easy that way –”

“Harry James,” a woman reprimands, shortly, but it isn’t effective. Harry was only ever raised by people calling him something else.

“Don’t come crying to me,” Harry tells the lie of his godfather, who’s just standing there. That’s how much he cares. “If your boyfriend’s buggered off, then _you’re_ the one who should know where he’s gone. My third-year Defence against the Dark Arts teacher never gave a shit about one shitty student, who he didn’t even… Not until he wanted to fucking fuck off out of life, and _then_ , oh yeah, _then_ it was all right to _use_ him…”

Jaw clenched with an expression of utter spite, the dream of Sirius turns on a heel and starts storming out of the room.

“ _Padfoot_ ,” insists someone who looks like Harry in glass, distorted, breaking the silence, and he moves to take his best mate’s shoulder until he’s shoved roughly backwards, three steps, and a man turns into a dog, chasing his tail and streaking into the shadows.

“And now you won’t even face me, you _COWARD_ ,” Harry shouts after him, because he’s done this before.

They’re all looking at him. The man who’s not Harry looks startled, like a rabbit; Hermione’s face is in her hands. Ron’s frowning, concerned, and –

And Harry disapparates to Malfoy’s flat, because his insides are curdling and he’s done enough damage and he’s already losing control.

He paces – for a long time, it feels like, as his blood flares up into his face and his hands and he’s angry, he’s so _angry_. He’s in the kitchen at the back of the house because it’s further away from the drawing room, on the diagonal, but that’s still not far enough; he wants to sink inside his own chest; to be turned inside out; to rip his stomach from his mouth and throw it bloody to the floor and destroy it, crush it, ruin it underneath his feet, because he’s always been so _stupid_.

Again, then, eventually, his stomach turns and he sits down on the blue sofa no one ever uses and shakes, his lungs heaving with it, and he’s not sure he knows how to stop.

Looking up, Harry’s eyes catch on the spindly table. Lying at the centre there’s the securely wrapped parcel of his painting from the Summer Exhibition. Because it wasn’t a birthday present at all, now, was it?


	7. Another world, part 1

When Draco appears in the flat’s bedroom, later, there’s no reason for him and Harry to fall into an argument. Draco stayed behind to get the facts, but Harry doesn’t want to hear them. It’s fine, he’s certain. Uncle Moony was never intending to stay and now he’s gone, and that’s why he was acting so weird, so sad. He felt bad about his plans, but not enough to cancel them.

“You don’t believe that at all,” Draco states, exposed on the rug by the other side of the bed, not clinging to a wall. His expression is guarded.

Harry is standing closer to the wardrobes, shrugging with his arms crossed. “Yeah I do,” he says, sniffing once. “It’s the obvious conclusion.” His eyes are dry.

Rather than responding, Draco takes a step closer, his eyes solid on Harry’s. Then he speaks: “Never have I been so tempted to use legilimency without asking.”

The thought makes Harry shudder, and he looks away. He wonders, every now and again, how many times as a child –

“Because I’m a liar?” he suggests. That’s why it was needed.

“Because you are being fucking obtuse.”

“What’s the difference?”

This earns a snort. “I wouldn’t find anything useful, would I?” Draco goes on brutally. He’s not calm, Harry realises. “Swirling colours and chocolate frogs… _Flames_ ,” he decides. “Always flames, burning on oil and floating on water. You were desperately angry ten minutes ago,” he abruptly changes subject, and Harry’s looking at him again. “Tell me why.”

“I don’t like being blamed for things that aren’t my fault,” Harry tells him, as solidly as possible. He feels calmer in Draco’s snowscape flat. He always has done.

“But this _is_ your fault,” Draco tells him like an adder, his eyes slits. “You never should have gone away.”

“It is _not_ my fucking _fault_ ,” Harry spits, moving three steps towards him with violence, heart in his throat and heat in his face and air in his lungs –

Eyes secure on his, entirely colourless, everything surely occluded, and Merlin knows how, Draco smirks. He doesn’t move an inch. “Precisely,” he says without intonation, and he isn’t calm at all. “He made the choice to run, and then he ran.”

Draco’s close to Lupin. Harry’s seen them together, smoking and saying things in Latin, laughing about the sort of thing Hermione explains earnestly over the course of ten minutes.

“He didn’t _choose_ ,” Harry insists, contradicting himself, put off by Draco’s chic muggle clothing, his short-sleeved shirt not even black, but forest green. He’s been smelling like sun cream all week, because there’s no ointment against UV, only the muggle stuff, conjured, copied from the bottle. Harry came up with a way to get it slathered on neatly and never mark any clothes. It’s been giving Draco a cockstand every morning (“I’m not going to _expose_ myself, Harry.”

“Safety first,” Harry’s been telling him, before forgetting to put it on himself.).

“No one _chooses_ to run,” Harry returns to the point and Draco’s insolent expression, here in the flat. “They lose the ability to –”

“Stay standing still?” Draco suggests, his hair flopping in a swoop from his side-parting. “What a perfect semantic argument.”

“Shut up,” says Harry, glaring. He’s losing his thread. “Stop – being you,” he comes out with.

“Being _me_ ,” Draco repeats, entirely derisive, no emotion in his eyes.

“You’re being dramatic,” Harry decides, because Draco’s basically kicking off, acting impenetrable. He’s making Harry’s fingers itch. “Moony’s gone to be on his own for a bit; maybe he’ll come back; maybe he won’t; he’s a grown man – it’s not our place to…”

Emotion doesn’t flare from Draco’s expression so much as leak out, pooling and growing and expanding until he’s standing there, when Harry looks up, livid.

“ _Why_ do you insist on defending these people?” he demands, and he’s fuming, he’s insulted, his pride’s been hurt by Lupin leaving, and Harry likely shouldn’t have called him dramatic.

At the same time, what he says is distracting. “These people?” Harry asks, confused. “Who are these _people?_ ”

“All of them,” Malfoy spits at him, obtuse.

Harry shakes his head, a flicker of worry in his chest, because he’s missed something. “I have no idea what you’re on about.”

Turning away, Draco seems to bleach white in his fury, his clothes turning black with the contrast. And then he turns back to Harry, uncontrolled. “I don’t know why you think so highly of Professor _Snape_ ,” he sneers, and it comes out of nowhere. “How could you stand there and defend him?”

He’s paused on the edge of the rug, his eyes cutting and sharp. This is the truthful inside of him, and Harry stands stock-still to see it.

“I can understand taking it up with your _father_ ,” Draco goes on, clearly lying. “But the entire wizarding community…”

“ _Snape?_ ” Harry asks him, catching up. The memorial was months ago; it’s – horrifying, that Draco’s been nursing this grievance till now. The world turns. “What’s Snape got to do with anything?”

Meeting his gaze, Draco raises his chin, as though daring Harry to tell him to hide. “The man had fifteen years to make a difference in this world and what did he do? He sat there in his dungeon and he waited. _Wow_.” His tone billows with scorn.

He sounds like Harry’s mum, Harry thinks (“Moping around being _sarky_ …”).

And yet the answer is right there in Harry’s head. “Dumbledore needed him to –”

“To do _what?_ ” Draco insists.

“To protect me,” Harry says shortly, and he knows that he sounds like a child.

Because he’s being honest, Draco’s expression softens, and he looks so _pitying_. “There’s no reason to believe that he knew where you _were_ for the first ten years, and he followed that by making your life a misery for two hours a week. What kind of protection is that?”

Harry knows all of this. He looks away, towards the bright summer’s day outside. “There’s lots of different types of protection,” he says. “And I reminded him of my dad. He hated my dad, so –”

“If he hated your _dad_ , then he hated his beloved Lily,” Draco says, predictably. He has old-fashioned views on these things. “There’s no version of her who didn’t take his hand.”

“But there _was_ , once upon a time,” Harry tells him, frustrated. He doesn’t know why they’re talking about this and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. “I can’t resent him, for being in love with…” The doe, Harry thinks. His mum’s not a doe, but he can imagine that she might have been, once. It’s ironic, because that doe was likely the part of her doomed to fall for a stag. And this is likely Draco’s point. It doesn’t matter, Harry tells himself. “He saved me from Quirrell, when I was small, on my broom, and he told the Order when I thought that –”

Entirely sarcastic, Malfoy is rolling his eyes and shaking his head.

“He saved _you_ ,” Harry snaps, and he’s not even sure why they’ve come onto this. “D’you never think about that?” He waves his hand around aimlessly. “If he hadn’t with Dumbledore... All this with you I owe to him. I can’t even imagine –”

He imagines it. He imagines the news; he imagines seeing it in a dream. Draco Malfoy, seventeen years old, Cedric’s age, dropping empty and lifeless at the flash of Voldemort’s yew. Narcissa screaming; Bellatrix laughing. Harry wouldn’t have much cared; he’d have felt a pang of pity.

It makes him feel sick.

“You think that I was saved?” Malfoy’s asking him quietly, bitter. “You think that he brought me to salvation? Living in that – _school?_ ”

It’s true that Harry never saw with his own eyes what happened to Hogwarts in seventh year. He’s heard plenty. He treads as carefully as he can. “If Snape hadn’t been there, the Carrows –”

“The Carrows would have done _exactly_ as they did,” Malfoy declares, his voice arch. His eyes look like glass. “I stood there and reported it.” To the Wizengamot, he means. The hard expression on his face is ugly, and Harry forces himself to keep his mouth shut. “Short of making us murder each other,” he suggests sarcastically, his emotions concealed, “there was no further depth left to sink to – and need we _recall_ that our lord frowned on internecine execution.” He finishes contemptuously, “I rather think that it was a higher authority than _Snape_ who drew the line.”

Now, Harry’s not certain what this means, but he thinks the idea is that Voldemort didn’t want his people killing each other, nor their children in the castle. If any of them were to be punished with the Killing Curse, he did it himself, as a power move.

And it’s moments like this when Malfoy goes into his head and talks so easily of murder – or whatever the hell he’s on about – that Harry thinks he understands why some people might never like him. There are things that Malfoy’s seen and done which are things that Harry’s seen and done, and they can’t be talked about with the appropriate emotions, because those emotions don’t exist.

“It was too late, by the time I stood on that tower,” Malfoy says, and he’s mocking himself. There’s sorrow in his eyes, Harry thinks, and he believes himself entirely lost. “I had no innocence left,” he admits, and it costs him, Harry thinks. He presses a hand to his chest as though it’s burning. His expression doesn’t change.

Harry doesn’t agree in the slightest, and the gesture makes him think of something else. “He saved you when I –”

In an instant, Malfoy’s eyes flash and his hand turns into a fist. “He _invented_ the curse that made me bleed!” he declares incredulously, rearing up, his tone wild. “Six years I spent in that man’s tutelage,” he spits, and Harry’s never had any clue that this is how he feels. “Six years under prefects who’d grown up by his instruction. And _never_ ,” he states damningly, “was anything said to me to challenge the views of my parents.”

“What –?” Harry tries to begin. There was the Sorting Hat; there was Dumbledore; there was Harry and his house and his friends, hexing and shouting at him…

Harry supposes that he means he never heard anything from someone he respected. But – he only used to respect those whose views he agreed with, didn’t he?

“Fifteen _years_ ,” Malfoy repeats, his eyes cold. “If he hated the Dark Lord so much, he could have cut him off at the knees.”

It’s not difficult for Harry to follow what Malfoy is saying, even if he’s not certain why he’s saying it now. There’s another world out there, Harry’s sure of it, where Snape turned his skills of manipulation to raising a generation of Slytherin right, or else at least better, fomenting muggleborn equality one intervention at a time.

And there’s a chance, Harry’s sure of it, that even in their own world Snape could have made a difference in the light instead of in the darkness.

At the same time, it’s never been clear to Harry what Snape believed in, besides the goodness of Lily Evans, making friends by the stream, so really –

It seems possible that he was hateful, in the end, and he truly resented every spark of brilliance Hermione showed, just for the fact that she was Hermione Granger, whose mother’s maiden name has never been on the books, and she was difficult with it. It seems possible that Snape did as much as he could, on these terms, and that was small and shadowed because he was in the end a small and shadowed person. Petty.

He must have hated Dumbledore, Snape, by the end – because he found what was needed to forcibly tear Dumbledore’s soul and body asunder. And yet he did it anyway, on Dumbledore’s word, and all the small things he did became big.

There’s something to admire in that, Harry’s sure of it. The strength of his loyalty, if nothing else.

“What?” Malfoy demands after Harry’s been thinking for a while, his eyes dry, his colouring bone.

Harry shakes his head, because he doesn’t know how to explain it. “I’m thinking about what it takes to be a spy,” he says instead, because it must be something like that. A sense of personal insignificance, which Malfoy will never know. A belief in the power of love and care expressed through death, through absence, through lies. “I’m thinking about how Snape never could’ve done what you’re suggesting.”

As a reply, Malfoy sneers.

“He’d never’ve been up for the backlash,” Harry insists on making this point. Snape was never Gryffindor, and Malfoy doesn’t realise how much he – “Not from people like your…”

Rage like light crosses Malfoy’s expression, and Harry doubles back.

“He’d never have risked looking weak. Dumbledore must’ve known that,” says Harry. “He understood people.”

“He used people,” Malfoy says plainly, staring Harry down, his voice deep and cold.

“He didn’t –”

“He used _you_ ,” Malfoy tells him, as though this is unforgivable. “He took you from us and he broke you.”

“He didn’t _break_ me –”

Malfoy keeps pushing, and something’s not right about his expression. Harry can’t tell what he’s not saying. It sounds like he’s lying, but Harry’s not sure who to. “He –”

_He killed you._

It makes Harry so _angry_ , this accusation, because if anyone killed Harry, it was himself, and they’ll all hate him for that, when they figure it out. He shouts, never able to prevent it, heat in his chest and his hands forming fists, seeing only cool grey, “You don’t know _anything_ –”

“I know more than enough –”

“How else was I supposed to win the war?”

“I would find you a _dozen_ ways,” Malfoy shouts back at him, arch and serious and promising, pulling his hand through the air as though he’s throwing himself at Harry’s feet. His face is haughty and pointy and pale.

Harry can’t let himself believe it. He looks away, frustrated, the afternoon bright outside the windows.

In the periphery of his vision, he can see Malfoy breathing. He can feel the cut of his gaze, his eyes raking, reading Harry from head to toe.

For seventeen years now, on and off, Harry has been learning to read Draco Malfoy. Draco’s been doing the same – 

– and Harry forgets this sometimes.

He feels it, the moment when Draco realises what Harry isn’t saying.

“You’ve already found one,” Draco says, measured and careful.

Shaking his head, Harry can’t look at him.

“Don’t you dare –”

“Don’t fucking call me a liar,” Harry snaps too early, glaring at him.

Draco glares back, unimpressed.

And – Harry finds himself letting it go, giving up on this secret. It’s like something’s torn from him. “It’s not nice,” he sneers, rubbing a thumb through one of his eyebrows. “And it’s not clean. Someone would’ve had to kill me anyway, because it wouldn’t’ve left me any less of a horcrux. But it would’ve bought us time, and maybe we’d’ve found the others.” Maybe he could have lived as he was, and they could have kept Voldemort’s shade in a jar.

“Harry,” says Draco, with terrible patience. He could build a brilliant jar, most likely, these days.

“I took one life in the war that wasn’t mine,” Harry says, looking down at Draco’s tan-and-cream boat shoes – a necessity, he insisted, the same day he gave in on wearing shorts.

He’s not sure why he’s saying this, Harry. He’s not sure where he is.

“I could have taken two and lived with it. I could’ve gone that bit further.”

“What are you talking about?” asks Draco, with little intonation.

“I could’ve killed Peter Pettigrew,” says Harry, and admitting it makes him titter. Two tears emerge from his eyes as he blinks and he has to dash them away. He looks outside again at the bright August day and he looks at Draco, who’s still wearing sharp muggle clothes.

He came up with this long after everything with Ginny. It took him a year, to work it all out. He’s always been slow.

“Sirius and Moony had their wands raised to kill him, back when it first came out. I’m the one who stopped them,” Harry explains, looking down. “I didn’t want them to do something so ugly, killing their best mate from school…” Harry’s stomach turns at the thought of it even now, but that’s a weakness which he should have worked through. “Not for me or my... Dumbledore told me that Dad would have spared his life too.”

Draco’s stone-coloured eyes are sharp, and Harry loves him so fiercely in this moment, for the way that he doesn’t react. He batters the feeling down.

“He said it to make me feel better,” Harry points out, taking off his glasses and dashing fingers at his eyes again. “He did a lot of that. Everyone forgets… But it’s true, I reckon,” he goes on. “The idea of _James Potter, Order of Merlin_ turning on a mate…” Harry rolls his eyes.

Even now, Draco says nothing.

It’s difficult to breathe, Harry finds. “He used to be my patronus, you know?” Harry explains, rubbing his eyebrow and looking down at the threads of the rug. “My dad.” He admits it. “He hasn’t been in years, and I know that this is why. He couldn’t do what I did. He couldn’t do what I know I could, looking back.”

“What form does your patronus take now?” Draco asks carefully.

Harry shakes his head, refusing to get into it. “He was only a rat, Peter, most of the time; I could’ve drowned him in a bucket.” Something with teeth could have eaten him whole.

“ _Harry,_ ” says Draco, all angles, biting enquiry.

“I didn’t think about it when I saved him,” Harry says, looking up at the ceiling, swallowing and dropping his chin. “But that was stupid,” he says, and he knows it. “Trelawney made a prophecy, so I knew it was important, and everything that happened afterwards…”

It takes a moment for Harry to regather his thread.

Looking at Draco, Harry remembers a memory. “Dumbledore wanted to save your soul,” he points out, almost laughing, and this makes Draco react, almost flinch. “That’s why he got Snape to kill him. Snape’s soul was already gone,” Harry allows. “Mine was doomed to go in the end. I have a feeling that Moony’s…” They’re both wolves, Harry thinks. “It was Sirius’s soul we saved that night,” he decides, and it feels ironic, given that this is literally what Harry did, in the end, with his stag. And then they lost him anyway. “Dad saved his soul when he saved Snape, and then Snape saved yours.”

Draco looks lost at the comment about Harry’s father, so Harry waves a hand to tell him not to worry about it.

“He died before the end,” Harry points out about Wormtail, before tutting at himself. “You’ll remember, I expect; it was in your cellar. This hand-thing Riddle gave him –”

“I remember the hand,” says Draco shortly, his expression unreadable.

“He took mercy on me and it took revenge on him,” Harry explains, meeting Draco’s eyes. “We got away at the cost of his life – because I told him he owed me.” Again, without thinking. “I cashed him in to get away, and what difference would it’ve made, really, to have cashed him in a few years before?”

He means for this question to hang in the air, as vivid and unanswerable as it is every time it returns to Harry’s thoughts. And yet Draco won’t let it. “This is what I’ve been trying to explain,” he says pedantically, emotion seeming to come on him again as his grey eyes dart from Harry’s and down into nowhere, his thoughts, Harry’s chest. Sunlight gleams from his hair. “We are defined by our choices; Snape’s feelings for your mother, his protection, his help at the end – these things don’t mitigate _years_ …”

“Nah,” Harry interrupts him, because he doesn’t know how to believe it. Draco raises his chin and Harry stares him down. “We’re defined by where we end up. Peter ended up dead, and if I’d have killed him earlier, we’d be living in a better world.”

For a long time, Draco looks at him. His expression is inscrutable, and Harry feels frustrated by it, given the week that they’ve spent together.

“It’s true,” he says, shrugging, and he imagines that Draco is judging him.

As it is, he only sighs. “Harry, this isn’t you,” he says, and it’s maddening. “I don’t know why you’re reacting this way, taking it out on your godfather, on yourself, when Lupin… Do you think you deserve –”

“It has _nothing_ to do with that,” Harry shouts without meaning to, taking a step forward and raising a fist to his mouth, breathing in. “Why d’you think –”

Draco shakes his head, tension in the lines of his face as he frowns, almost as though he’s deeply upset. It pulls at something deep in Harry’s chest.

“Stop looking at me!” Harry shouts, frustrated.

Swallowing, Draco looks down. He’s a lonely figure in this huge, pale room, the energy of him all contained chaos. It seems to hold, for a moment, and Harry breathes – but then a sneer crosses his expression and he looks at Harry with pure venom. “You know what I think?” he says harshly.

It makes Harry move to his wand.

Malfoy moves to his own. “I think fuck Albus Dumbledore,” he spits irreverently, drawing hawthorn, “fuck Severus Snape and fuck Remus fucking Lupin.” He doesn’t give Harry a single second to react. “Fuck Peter Pettigrew and fuck every fucking bastard who’s ever fucking touched you, ever fucking left you and fuck it all, I am going into work,” he finishes harshly. “I couldn’t fucking look at you right now if you even fucking dared show your face.”

And then, with a slash of his wand and a _crack_ , he’s disapparated, leaving.

Harry stares at his absence, and then with a rush he’s so frustrated that he starts laughing.

“I’ll see you later,” he tells the empty bedroom, sniffing as he gestures with his wand.

* * *

It’s not long after this when Hermione knocks on the bedroom door to give him orders. _“Harry, stop sulking and come out for some lunch.”_

“I’m not hungry,” he tells her, and it’s true. He’s been enjoying his sulk. He’s turned his glasses dark green again, all sorts of other colours; he’s been pacing and getting into conversation with the mirror by the wardrobes.

Being Hermione, Hermione ignores Harry’s reply, and there’s a squeak as the door handle turns.

“Oi!” Harry shouts, complaining as he rushes over the rug.

There’s a scoff as the door swings open – though Hermione’s covering her eyes with a hand, it turns out, when she appears. “I know that Draco’s not here,” she points out as Harry sheepishly removes the colour from his lenses. “And I cannot believe that your first reaction was to…”

She’s peeking between her fingers, and Harry feels the urge to hide the whole room in a vortex. The bed hasn’t been used in a week – it’s perfectly made with fresh linen – and yet Harry’s sure it looks obscene. It’s the size of it. All the pillows. Kreacher’s the only one who’s ever seen it besides Harry and Draco, and Kreacher’s good at keeping secrets.

“Hmm,” says Hermione in that way of hers, taking everything in. “There’s not much of _you_ in here, is there?”

“That’s my trunk,” Harry points out without thinking, on the defensive.

The trunk is sitting next to the armchair by the window, on which there’s sitting the oversized bear from earlier in the year. Harry doesn’t know why they’ve kept it. He feels mortified. He should have turned it back into a hand towel.

“That’s… Nothing weird,” he tries, as the back of his neck crawls with embarrassment.

Hermione raises an eyebrow, looking at the thing. “How very _Brideshead_ ,” she says, and the reference passes Harry by. “What’s his name?”

“He doesn’t have a name,” Harry says quickly, grateful for this point. The bear’s eyes seem to judge him. “He’s a hand towel,” Harry tells the thing to shut up.

“He doesn’t look like a hand towel,” Hermione says, matter of fact – before drawing herself up with a breath and meeting Harry’s eyes again. “I’m sorry about Remus, Harry,” she informs him, before frowning, sympathetic to emotions which Harry doesn’t feel. “We’ll get things moving. Now that we know that he didn’t say anything to you, we can file a report – that’s what Ron’s doing.”

And Ron is missing, it’s true. He must have left at some point during Harry’s row with Malfoy.

He’ll be back soon, Harry tells himself. He always comes back.

“We can say that Remus is _at risk_ , you see,” Hermione explains. “The aurors will look into it, even though he’s quite capable of supporting himself and so on…” She’s pulling her bushy hair off her face to re-clip it. Harry’s not sure what she’s talking about. “The moon’s this evening,” she says, and Harry didn’t know.

“That’s why Sirius is so upset,” Harry imagines, looking behind Hermione to the open door.

“Well, yes, _partly_ …” Hermione agrees, her tone drying up into chastising before she looks at him and abruptly changes the subject. “Come out for some pasta,” she suggests, as though Harry’s the one who’s been affected and needs to be treated with care. She comes close and she’s herding him out of the door with the heat of her, her hand half a foot from his back. “I thought that we could have it up here, given how we’ve all fractured. Your own private kitchen-diner,” she mocks him lightly, as though he’s gone posh. “I’ve been waiting on an invite for months.”

It’s weird, but also not weird, to eat with Hermione at Malfoy’s ash dining table. A table cloth appears to cover it in chintz-patterned linen, and Harry thinks that Malfoy would likely throw a fit, because it doesn’t go at all, though he doesn’t want to think about Malfoy. The placemats are silver, trimmed with snakes, and Harry recognises them because Kreacher’s brought them out for every meal since Lupin came back.

The snakes on the centre mat writhe to meet those on the matching tureen of steaming puttanesca, when it appears. Harry tells them all to calm down, and he doesn’t think about the fact that he’s hissing.

It’s so petty, all of Kreacher’s silver. Harry’s not thought about it until now. Silver only harms werewolves if they ingest it or it enters an open wound, and there’s no way that enough traces have been getting in the food to cause Lupin physical upset. James has been serving him first at every meal anyway, to make sure that what he eats hasn’t touched the sides. But even then, maybe Harry should’ve…

“You know, Draco’s mirror in the hall is quite rude,” Hermione is saying, and it’s a reminder that she won’t be excluded from the conversation.

Serving them both pasta, Harry’s annoyed to realise that this is another meal that Malfoy’s successfully skipped. They were on three a day in France. Snacks. “It’s only rude if you don’t like yourself,” Harry says passingly, about the mirror, because he worked that out years ago.

“It said that I was gaining weight,” Hermione goes on, as though she might not have heard. “But of _course_ I’m gaining weight. I’m four months pregnant.”

Harry looks at her. She looks back at him. He remembers. “Oh yeah,” he says, embarrassed, sitting down and looking at his bowl. “How’s that going?”

With a wry smile, Hermione rolls her eyes. She’s entirely poised, Ron’s engagement ring glinting on her finger. “Like life,” she suggests, before giving him a look. “We told Molly that we thought we’d leave the wedding till after –”

There’s a knock on the wall, then, inside the doorframe, and it’s James. Apparently he can move silently, and it’s annoying, because that’s something Harry knows how to do.

“What are you doing here?” Harry asks shortly as Hermione looks over her shoulder. The fork in Harry’s hand is holding two pieces of penne, which he eats.

James blinks, and he glances at the food, likely annoyed that he hasn’t been the one to dish it up. He looks at Harry through his stupid square glasses, scratching his fingers at the back of his hair and he looks younger than Harry, better polished, better lived, no grey in his black hair at all.

“I came to see how you were,” he says eventually.

Harry feels angry with him in a rush of hot rage.

“Harry,” Hermione is warning, sat at the table.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Harry tells him, the words wet in his throat. The kitchen feels empty, without Draco in it; none of them should be here without him. It’s supposed to be Harry and Draco, tucked away, Harry winding up Draco while he fusses around over coffee.

A complete and utter bastard, James is frowning guilelessly, and he smiles shortly. “Uncle Moony will be safe home soon,” he declares, as though he’s decided, looking Harry in the eye, desperately posh and clipped and drawling, no genuine warmth to his voice, Harry tells himself. “I promise you.”

“You have no way of knowing that,” Harry tells him, because it seems to have escaped his attention. He feels unbearably frustrated, looking at this man, framed by the doorway and Draco’s snowy white walls, dressed in robes no matter that he isn’t going to work. The robes are casual and informal and blue, and he wears them like jeans and a casual shirt, the way that he was born to wear them. “You don’t know anything about it at all.”

Jaw tightening, James looks away – his eyes flash, as though he’s keeping something back.

Harry stands up, setting his fork to the bowl with a clink.

“ _Harry,_ ” Hermione’s saying again, sounding exhausted and pressing her hand to her face, clunking her elbow to the table.

“If you’ve got nothing to say,” Harry tells the man in the doorway, ignoring her, “you can go away and leave us alone.”

A tick in his jaw, the man in the doorway is looking off towards the units and the sink and the windows, his hand resting artfully on the doorframe. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says definitively, his expression serious as he stares Harry down. His jaw is set for confrontation.

It’s a likely story, Harry thinks. And it’s been a long time, since Harry felt this out of control. “Have you not figured it out?” he says, and he just wants him to _go_. “You are _nothing_ to me.”

“That’s _enough,_ ” Hermione exclaims, standing up. Her pasta’s forgotten, when she _needs_ it, Harry thinks. She’s pregnant.

“You’re not my father,” Harry tells his dad, standing in front him, heart in his throat. “My father’s dead. I’ve _heard_ it. I’ve heard it dozens of times.”

His dad blanches, staring at him.

“Dementors,” Harry tells him unkindly, tapping the side of his head. “And there was this other time,” he barrels on, because this is the moment when the man’s supposed to _leave_. “Tom Riddle –”

Malfoy’s not here, Harry reminds himself. Obviously he’s not.

“ _Voldemort_ kidnapped me, or close enough.” Harry relishes saying the name. It feels so hateful and it makes his dad startle. “He killed this boy who was with me, Cedric Diggory, who was only seventeen, and he took my blood to bring himself back to life and then he wanted us to duel, so he used the Imperius Curse –”

“This is _well_ past the point of acceptable –” Hermione says, her voice harsh as she smacks the table and makes all the crockery clink. The snakes hiss.

Harry doesn’t look at her, keeping his eyes on his father, who’s scowling, clenching his jaw. “It didn’t work,” he says measuredly, “but then there was this thing with our wands – and there he was, my dad’s ghost right in front of me. _Priori Incantatem._ ”

All he feels is anger, Harry decides. Murky-eyed, his dad is screwing up his nose, as though in distaste. These thoughts have been in Harry’s head for months.

Hermione is fuming, but she’ll always back him up, Harry knows. He’d do the same for her. There are some things that it’s impossible to go through together without eliminating all other options.

His dad and Wormtail – their problem was that they never got through it.

“You said that you were proud of me,” Harry tells his dad, to banish him. “You and Mum, and again at the end, with those two mates of yours. But you weren’t, were you?” Harry insists, even as hazel eyes stare at him. This feels right. “You weren’t even there. You were nothing but a voice in my head, a face in the glass, a name that everyone said to me.” Raw arrogance made into an image. “You don’t know what happened. And you don’t know anything now.”

Harry needs to get away. He knows that. But he’s standing here in the place that he always escapes to, and he doesn’t know where next to go.

“So fuck off, will you?” He goes on the attack instead, and he hates himself for swearing.

“Harry –” his dad says, the sound of it entirely wrong.

Against the sound of this name, Harry covers his face with his hands. He breathes in and he opens his eyes, returning his fists to his sides. “Leave me alone,” he begs his father, who can’t be the person he loved all his life, who died and stayed with him to the end. He can’t believe it; he can’t risk it. “Please, just go away.”

“Stop _saying_ that to me,” snaps James Fucking Potter, or whatever the F stands for. He strides forward and slams a hand on the tableclothed table, making Hermione jump, no matter that she’s just done the same. Harry’s heart skips, but he doesn’t react. “For fuck’s sake –” James begins, but he doesn’t seem to know how to finish. He sounds oddly hopeless. He sounds – different.

Abruptly, awkwardly, then, with a noise of frustration, he pulls back one of the spindly chairs and sits down. He doesn’t even sprawl, though his arm is on the table, his fingers tapping as though he wants a cup of tea to fiddle with.

Harry stares at him, his throat full of tears, swallowed and controlled.

He stares back. “Voldemort knew that you were coming before I did,” he comes out with, suddenly, his eyes twinkling as though it’s a joke. “Did you know that?” He grins, insincere. “You’re not the only one with secrets. He told me that someone had told him, but I think that he stole it out of Lily’s head. McKinnon’s, maybe. I didn’t believe him. I doubted your existence,” he says, as though it’s something to be ashamed of. “I thought that there wasn’t any possibility and he must have made it up to twist me around.” He finishes by clenching his jaw. “It took your grandparents decades, you know, to have me.”

“What?” Harry asks him, confused.

“You were a _miracle_ ,” James tells him, his eyes hard, and Harry doesn’t know what he means.

“I…” Hermione says, looking embarrassed and impotent, neither of which suits her; it’s Harry’s fault. “I should be getting back downstairs.”

“Stay,” Harry tells her, because he has no shame.

James speaks at the same time. “Sit down, sweetheart.”

Naturally, at everyone else, Hermione bristles and it really is a threat. “Do _not_ call me _sweetheart_.”

James looks at her, wry. “You might as well be our daughter.”

“And you can call her Hermione,” Harry retorts at the presumption, bringing murky eyes sharply to his. “Or Madam Granger.”

James makes a face. “ _Madam_ ,” he says to her, as though addressing people respectfully is in fact rude and unpleasant. “Do sit down.”

Hermione sits down with a dangerous-sounding harrumph. “ _Sir_ ,” she says contemptuously, as though she can’t help herself. The effect is slightly flirty, horrifically, and Harry doesn’t know why he has to live with people who get off on conflict.

Smirking, James is serving himself lunch, a bowl popped in from nowhere, and Harry feels stupid, standing up on his own. Reluctantly, awkwardly, he returns to his chair.

“Your mum’s flooing the pubs,” James declares, as though Harry has asked, as though they’re moving on. “She’ll have them watch out for Padfoot; she’s very persuasive.” He leaves the spoons in the tureen and picks up a fork with his left hand, stabbing quills.

“Wouldn’t he go to a muggle pub?” Hermione asks, and Harry doesn’t know what’s going on.

James shrugs a dramatic performance of a shrug, and it’s almost enough to get Harry’s back up again. “He forgets that muggle wallets don’t refill themselves. It’s an on-going project.”

“Gringotts does debit cards now,” reflects Hermione brightly. “The goblins won’t trust wizards or witches with credit… The conversion fee’s better than changing for cash.”

“What progress,” says James, before he fills his mouth with pasta. Harry gets the impression that he won’t be passing on the information, which is likely good for Grimmo’s accounts.

“What were you saying?” demands Harry then, back to the point. “Voldemort.”

James looks at him, shrewd. It’s unfamiliar. “I’m not saying anything,” he answers neatly, cracking another insincere grin as if to point out that Harry’s asked him for a _story_.

Harry grits his teeth.

“It was the turn of 1980,” James tells Hermione, as though she should remember this for the test. She makes a sound as though she’s interested, and all Harry can work out is that they’re somehow in conspiracy. “You-Know-Who made this rather pathetic attempt to sway me to the cause, telling me all this guff about Lily and Padfoot and Moony and Wor–” James cuts himself off, clenching his jaw and looking away for a moment. Harry feels something – almost sympathy. “Mum and Dad had recently succumbed to the so-called pox outbreak at the Ministry.”

He gives both Harry and Hermione a serious look here, as though to make clear that it was by no means the pox which took down Harry’s grandparents. Harry didn’t know that this was the line.

“It was something of a low point,” he admits quickly to Hermione, “but I told him that I didn’t give a fuck about anything he said, and eventually I escaped.”

Harry starts, his eyes rising from the tablecloth’s chintz to look at his father.

“I think that your mother sent him a howler,” he’s saying to Harry. He rolls his eyes fondly. “She claims that she would never do anything so –”

“What do you mean?” asks Hermione, hesitantly. She’s adjusting her position in her seat. “Escape from where?”

“Oh, I was being held captive,” says Harry’s dad dismissively, wrinkling his nose and not quite looking at them. “Only for a couple of weeks. Twenty-three days. It was character-building; it doesn’t matter.” He jokes, his eyes wide, “It wasn’t like I had to cut off a limb.” _Ha ha ha._ “The point is –”

He looks at Harry.

Harry looks back at him, wondering if he should have known. His dad was held captive, like Luna and Ollivander. Likely tortured. He doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.

His dad grins yet another insincere grin, and Harry feels as though he’s broken some sort of trust. He wasn’t ever supposed to know about this, and now he does.

He feels filthy, all of it a layer of sweat over his skin. His dad was never supposed to have felt any pain.

“The point is,” says Harry’s dad, even more insincerely, emotion dark in his eyes, and Harry feels worse. “You don’t know me very well.”

Harry can feel his eyes burn, and he remembers a pensieve. He remembers being sure.

“You’re my son; it’s not your job,” Harry’s dad allows. “But it’s true, I suppose, that you’re grown up now and should be treated as such.” He looks Harry in the eye. “I’ll tell you directly like anybody else. I am remarkably difficult to manipulate.” He smiles, just a little, and he’s ironic like Sirius. “You’ll need to spend every day at my side for at _least_ seven years and even then be buoyed by a run of good luck.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Harry tells him, the taste of the words bitter on his tongue.

His dad looks at him, tonguing a tooth, and it makes Harry’s face burn hot. “I’m saying that I won’t be put off.” He aims his fork towards the front of the house. “Not by anyone out there, not by anyone in here, and not by you.”

He points the fork at Harry, and it’s in his left hand. It doesn’t make sense, because no one told Harry that James Potter was left-handed. He holds his wand in his right; it must make it difficult to cast.

“Of course I’m proud of you,” he says, and he sounds confused that he has to say it out loud. “Always was; always will be. The only thing that’s changed is that you have no desire to hear it.”

And it’s awful, because at this point Harry plants his elbow on the table, and he has to swallow his own face, it feels like, to hold himself together. He presses his fist to his mouth, before he picks up his own fork again.

His dad is still looking at him, his eyes sharp behind his glasses. “And since we’re doing this,” he adds humourlessly, sounding like he did on the radio. “You will _never_ talk to your Uncle Padfoot like that again. You knew exactly what you were doing and it was beneath you.” Again he sounds confused, his tone arch; it’s as though Harry’s confused him. “We don’t behave that way. We’re _Potters_.”

There are words on the tip of Harry’s tongue to sneer at this, the Potter name. He doesn’t know where they’ve come from. He feels hot and embarrassed.

“Your Uncle Moony loves you more than life. You’d do well not to forget.”

“He’s got a funny way of showing it,” Harry can’t help but mutter into his pasta.

“Yes,” agrees Harry’s dad shortly, as though Harry’s being slow.

There’s silence for a while after this, and Harry doesn’t look up, eating.

“Draco’s gone into work,” says Hermione eventually, as though this explains everything.

“I imagined that he had,” agrees Harry’s dad breezily, as though they’re having lunch. He sighs. “I’ve told him; it’s terribly unhealthy, working at the weekend – but what can be done? Will you be going to see Teddy?” he asks Harry.

“Obviously,” Harry tells him through gritted teeth. He doesn’t have to think about it. “It’s Saturday.” He’s never missed one. Mucking around with Teddy used to be his hangover cure.

“Good lad,” says Harry’s dad today, and he’s smiling, weirdly, when Harry reacts, his eyes a murky brown-blue.


	8. Another world, part 2

Whatever Harry’s dad is expecting from Harry’s visit to Teddy, Harry thinks, he’s going to be disappointed. It’s clear, once he arrives, that this won’t be a long day in Essex.

Teddy has plans, as he has done nearly all summer, to meet up with AJ, AJ’s brother and a mix of their friends at the skate park. They’re making the most of the long days and they’re all ten or twelve now, keen to be off on their own.

Harry was seeing himself to the Little Whinging park at age six, so he agrees with Auntie Dromeda that they’ll likely be all right. AJ’s brother and his mates all have mobile phones.

It’s nice, really. It’s a relief, that Teddy’s popular. It pulls at something in Harry’s chest, that Harry Saturdays are no longer highly anticipated festivals of fun, but that’s how these things go.

“Sounds good,” he tells Teddy when he’s informed of the plans, not expecting to be asked about his holiday. “You learned any tricks yet?”

“Harry, I’ve been doing tricks for months.” Teddy’s amber eyes are deeply sarcastic. “I can do a 360.”

He’s wearing the innocent expression that he gets when he’s lying. His hair is a huge mop of brown these days, because he’s gone off his grandma’s selection at the barber’s, but Harry can still read him, just like when he was six. He gives the boy a look, here in the Tonks family living room.

“I can do a 270 sometimes,” Teddy allows, ducking his head and burying his hands in the front pocket of his teal cotton hoody. Harry guesses that a 270’s still good, even if he has no idea what Teddy’s on about. “I’m gonna get it today,” the boy insists, looking up, looking earnest. “I watched a video.”

Harry wonders if he means a DVD.

“All right,” Harry tells him, and he sees a first year now, more than ever. A first year in Hufflepuff, trying hard. “But don’t forget what the man in the shop said. Take your time learning the easy stuff and it’ll set you up better –”

“Muscle memory, yeah, yeah, I know,” Teddy tells him impatiently like a first year in Gryffindor, jittering on his feet. One of AJ’s brother’s mates broke her arm at the start of the summer, but it hasn’t put Teddy off at all. Harry’s not sure how he feels about this. “Harry, I’ve got to get _ready,_ ” Teddy pleads, running late like Harry always does.

“Well, go on then,” Harry allows.

Still, Harry likes AJ and his brother Max and his mum, Agnieszka. She’s only thirty-five or so, younger than Bill, and she could even be Percy’s age, Harry thinks. She’s on her own with AJ and Max, and she treats Harry like he’s Teddy’s dad.

Weirdly, she clocked Malfoy years ago, when he and Harry weren’t serious and Teddy and AJ hadn’t long become friends (“So, who’s the blondie? I see the way you look at him.”).

Harry felt too polite to either correct her or lie to her, so ended up saying only that Malfoy was Teddy’s mum’s cousin. Annie found this hilarious. She watches a lot of _EastEnders_.

Hilarious or not, Harry explained to Annie about Malfoy – and it _was_ hilarious, definitely – it was also new and hush-hush and a side-event, and Teddy didn’t know and Auntie Dromeda didn’t need to know, and neither he nor Malfoy was comfortable being open about it just yet.

This conversation ended up the most truthful Harry thinks he’s ever had about his relationship with Malfoy. It was supposed to be a pack of lies to cover the fact that he was engaged in never-sober, casual sex with someone they all used to jinx, typically outside and often in a shed.

“Cheer up,” Auntie Dromeda tells Harry today, once Teddy’s run off to put on his protective kit. Harry finds her in the kitchen. “Give it a year, and you’ll have him full time. Where will Grandma be?”

“He won’t talk to me at Hogwarts,” Harry tells her, finding space for the last saucepan in the dishwasher, because they’ve just had lunch too, here in the Tonks house. “It’ll be weird to act like he knows me. He’ll hate that I’m reading his work.”

“Are we talking about Teddy or his teacher?” Auntie Dromeda asks, tucking her wand away now that she’s finished cleaning the surfaces. She pushes her heavy brown hair back, though it never moves much around her shoulders. “Right. Am I putting the kettle on, or are you heading straight home?”

He can hardly go back to Grimmo, Harry thinks. He’s only just got here, and he did hear his Auntie Dromeda’s rather pointed remark about being left alone. So he says that he’ll stay, and the doorbell rings, and Teddy comes running downstairs looking like a tortoise in his apple-green helmet, pulling out his bike from under the stairs. It’s the only thing that lives there, besides old bags and boxes. He opens the door to a gang of pre-teen children, all saying “Teddy! Teddy!” and he fends them off as though he was born to manage crowds of admirers (“Keep your hair on; I’m coming!”).

He leaves in a whirlwind with a kiss to his grandmother’s cheek, which increasingly looks like something Malfoy would do, only not, because this is Teddy and he only answers with a mischievous grin when Grandma tells him to be good.

“See you later, Harry!” he says, and today it’s like they’re mates. He’s taller than last week, Harry could swear.

“How are the newspapers?” Auntie Dromeda asks, once the door’s slammed and it’s quiet. She’s making tea, putting biscuits on a plate.

She’s been asking the same thing every week. “I’m ignoring the papers,” Harry tells her resolutely.

Auntie Dromeda nods, as though this is sensible. Harry’s not sure what to think about it. “How was the holiday?”

Harry shrugs. “All right.”

Auntie Dromeda’s looking at him, and Harry’s forgotten it, her reaction last week. He wonders if Teddy’s worked it out yet, and what they should tell him.

It’s difficult, Harry thinks. Teddy’ll either be happy or he’ll find it unnerving, and if he’s happy he’ll only be sad if and when Harry and Malfoy break up. They might well have broken up before lunch, though the optimistic take is that they haven’t, for now.

The hypocrisy of these thoughts doesn’t _exactly_ pass Harry by, but he also thinks that there’s a difference between the ages of ten and fifteen.

“I dunno what you want me to say,” Harry tells Auntie Dromeda, as they sit down on her pristine cream sofa. It’s a lot like one the Dursleys owned before Dudley scored open the cushions with a train. Harry was never given permission to sit on it. “It was nice; it was France; I’ve never been.” He and Malfoy had sex at least twice a day for a week. Once in the car. “We’re having a row now,” he concludes.

Sitting in the armchair in front of the bay window, Auntie Dromeda sips her tea, cup hovered over the saucer. “Holidays are stressful,” she observes, and it leaves Harry confused. “Draco drove?” she suggests, with a swallow.

“In the end,” agrees Harry, holding his tea at his knees. It was mostly down country lanes at half the speed that they should have been going, but Harry found the country lanes harder sometimes. Bumpy and narrow. He’s not sure why it matters. “He did the French.”

“I should think so too,” Auntie Dromeda approves.

The silence lingers for a bit, and Harry thinks that he can hear a clock in the hall.

“What are your intentions, Harry, for this relationship with my nephew?” Auntie Dromeda asks this question politely, her cup of tea elegant in her fingers.

Harry is entirely taken aback. Andromeda’s looking at him with hooded eyes and a thin expression to her mouth. They’re Bellatrix’s features, Harry knows, though his memory of Bellatrix is vague enough that he couldn’t say how anymore. She looks a lot like Sirius too, Andromeda, when she laughs, and her build reminds Harry of him much more than Narcissa or Draco, who must have got the same genes as Regulus.

They’re all family, Harry realises in a moment. He thought – he would have thought that Andromeda was his, after all this time, maybe even more than Draco’s, though that’s a harsh thought which Harry doesn’t like himself for thinking. Sometimes he forgets that Draco’s related to anyone, rather than born out of magic in the Department of Mysteries. Sometimes he forgets that Teddy isn’t his to keep.

“I’m not trying to catch you out,” Andromeda is saying, almost smiling as the clock ticks. Harry curls his stocking toes into the carpet – because he didn’t even bother to put on shoes before he came through the floo. “I’m asking because I’m the only one left to look after his interests. I’m quite certain that Sirius –”

“You’ve known me for years,” Harry says, not sure what he’s saying. He’s reminded of invitations to Christmas which never seemed as keen as Molly’s – and he hasn’t seen Molly in ages; he feels terrible, after the wedding. He puts down his tea on the table beside him, because he doesn’t want to spill it on the sofa. He makes sure to put the cup in its saucer on a coaster.

“You have always been excellent with Teddy,” Andromeda says. Her expression is serene, and Harry guesses the next word to come out of her mouth. “But unless I’m mistaken,” she goes on, “this is your first committed relationship, and the first time we do anything we make mistakes.”

This isn’t true, in Harry’s experience. He can think of a dozen occasions when his first time came out all right, not least because it had to.

He doesn’t say this, because he thinks that it would sound arrogant. And he believes in practice, these days. And he doesn’t do relationships, in general.

“Something to reflect on,” Andromeda suggests, before Harry can work out how his thoughts add up. “What are you arguing about?” she then asks, with another sip of tea, and Harry doesn’t want to tell her.

“It’s nothing,” Harry says, thinking that this is why he didn’t want anyone to know. “Just stuff.”

“Hmm,” says Andromeda. “Well. As long as you don’t mess him around, I’m sure that we won’t have a problem.”

Harry wonders if she’s been talking to Ron, who took him aside before they went out for Malfoy’s birthday in June (“Let me ask this one thing and I’ll never bring it up again, yeah?”).

Harry asked why this hadn’t come up four years ago; Ron gave him a sarcastic look.

“Let’s change the subject,” Andromeda suggests today, putting down her tea, and Harry wonders if he can get away with eating a biscuit. “I’m thinking of taking Teddy to Ollivander’s,” she tells him forthrightly, her expression clear and her cardigan just like one of Molly Weasley’s, even if it’ll be made out of something lighter than wool for the summer, and her jewellery’s much more glittery. “It would have been something to consider at Christmas, in any case, but he’s grown up a great deal in the past few months, and it would be good for him to go to Hogwarts with some basics.”

After what they’ve been talking about, Harry’s not sure how to take these remarks. Is he being asked for his opinion, or –?

“He’s going to find the stakes relatively low this year,” Andromeda continues. “At least compared to some of his pals. I don’t want him getting distracted.”

Harry remembers now that Essex is one of the few counties to still run the 11+, a test for children Teddy’s age to sort them into secondary schools. Generally Harry thinks that it sounds less like trying on a hat and more like fighting a troll.

Annie didn’t want AJ to take it, last they spoke, but Miss Gray the Year 5 teacher was suggesting that they should try for one of the nice schools in Chelmsford, which would effectively sort AJ into Ravenclaw or Slytherin.

“It will give him something to do with that father of his,” Andromeda finishes about Teddy, looking content.

As with any plan Andromeda makes, it’s difficult to see at the end what the main prompt has been. The idea comes with fifteen different moving parts, and woe betide anyone who wants to disrupt a single one.

The woe, Harry expects, will be visible on his face.

Andromeda’s own face tightens as she reads him and she slaps her knees in a display of something much worse than her suspicion about Harry’s intentions. “Oh, _what_ has that man done now?” she demands.

It makes Harry start, if only on the inside, and it makes him answer back. “He hasn’t done anything.”

This washes straight over Andromeda, who isn’t Harry’s family and clearly isn’t Lupin’s either, despite the fact that she’s raising his son. “Don’t tell me,” she insists, looking sharp and aristocratic. “He’s bottled it, hasn’t he? Completely bottled it.” She adds as a dig, “So much for Gryffindor.” 

“He’s only stepped out for a couple of days,” Harry says solidly, his stomach clenching with the lie.

“And did he offer an excuse?” Andromeda demands, her hooded eyes dark. “Or did he simply disappear?”

Something gulping pulls at Harry’s throat. “I don’t know; we were on holiday,” he admits. He can’t remember what Lupin said to him; he might have said something useful. “The aurors are looking into it.”

“The _aurors_ ,” Andromeda scoffs, and she blames them, Harry remembers, for her husband and daughter’s deaths.

There’s a glint in her eyes that’s sadistic, Harry thinks. He doesn’t look away.

“ _Ron’s_ an auror,” Harry tells her, though he couldn’t spell out why. “A senior auror, when he passes his test.” Something Tonks never worked enough years to try taking, which is a sad thought; she was younger than they all are now.

“And how does _Ron_ intend to find him?” asks Andromeda.

“By – doing auror…” Harry finds himself struggling. From what he remembers of shadowing Kingsley, everything involves a lot of reading. Refusing cups of tea in case of potions.

“Well,” Andromeda catches him, sarcastic. “I suppose that sounds –”

Harry looks up and glares. If she’s going to imply that Ron’s bad at his job… “They’ll follow clues,” Harry says shortly, without hesitation. “People always retrace their steps.”

Silent in her reaction, Andromeda’s lips purse. “I have Remus’s things in the loft,” she comes out with in the end, stewing, her thoughts parcelled away. “There wasn’t much that wasn’t shared, but there may be something.”

Harry – feels annoyed about this, because Andromeda’s made clear where Lupin stands. “We should talk to Luna about Teddy’s wand,” he says as they stand up, deciding that he won’t keep in the thought after all. “She’s about to start crafting.”

"I don’t want him having some training project –”

“She’s been studying with Ollivander for _seven years_ ,” Harry tells Andromeda, indignant, impatient, even as they’re moving to the stairs. “She’s whittled half of Lancashire. Teddy’ll likely get one of her casings whatever; it would be nice if he had something –”

Andromeda turns back to look at him, amused. “There’s no need to bite my head off, Harry,” she says, ending the argument.

* * *

There isn’t much in the loft – a trunk of ratty clothes and a record player, a modest selection of LPs, all a bit random. They’ve both forgotten that Andromeda years ago passed Harry the books.

But there is an old briefcase, tied up by string with _Professor R J Lupin_ in tatty gold letters. Harry doesn’t tell Andromeda when he takes it, snuck out in the trunk of clothes, because – because he doesn’t think that she deserves to know about it, in the moment that he finds it. He sneaks it through the floo, out of Lupin’s room, where he puts everything else, and then he heads down to the shed at the bottom of the garden.

It’s late afternoon, but no one catches him. They’re all out; Harry doesn’t know where.

And he doesn’t… He knows that it isn’t his job to look for Lupin. He was never an auror. He just thinks –

He doesn’t know what he’s thinking.

The briefcase contains a lot of rubbish, Harry concludes, sitting in the earth-smelling warmth of the shed. The inside is a recess, its base six accordion files, snugly lined up next to each other with their handles the only things visible when Harry first forces the locks.

The upper half of the briefcase lid contains a torn fabric pocket, full of entirely miscellaneous crap: receipts and ticket stubs and muggle biros without any ink left. Half a green packet of tobacco. This has long gone stale, though that might be the smell of normal tobacco, Harry thinks, screwing up his nose because it’s horrid.

As for the files, the first is depressing. It’s records – bills and bank statements, forever overdue and forever in and out of the red.

There’s another file of lesson plans, most of which are for Hogwarts, by the look of them. They’re slightly half-arsed, with the first years' entire summer term blocked out as _BASIC COMMON SENSE + REVISION_. Maybe this is surprising; maybe it’s reassuring. Harry bets that the lessons were good.

There’s nothing but rolls and sheets of blank parchment in the next file, which Harry would assume were being kept here for storage if he wasn’t familiar with the work of Messrs Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs. The _solemnly swear_ password doesn’t do anything, and neither do the few charms Harry knows, so he packs all the bits back away, in the end.

The fourth file is applications for jobs and rejections, contracts and a surprising number of muggle P45s. A large number of the documents aren’t in English, and of these the majority are in French, Harry thinks. A few might be Spanish or Italian. There are CVs from what looks like various eras, and the name at the top is most often _John Lupin_. Or _John LUPIN_ , which Harry finds amusing for no reason.

The fifth file is newspaper clippings, most of which concern the boy who lived. Harry ignores them.

Finally, there’s a file of correspondence.

It feels like a triumph – a discovery – until Harry realises that it dates back to 1973 and the most recent letters are from 1998 and there’s at least one from him, which he doesn’t remember, earnestly leading with _Dear Professor Lupin_ in chickenscratch, insecure handwriting that’s clearly a boy’s. Worse, there are several, a dozen, a score even, maybe, from Sirius, the handwriting familiar, the parchment well thumbed, the paragraphs long, and Harry can’t read another word, packing everything away and sitting there on the rough wooden floor of the shed at the end of the garden.

* * *

Sunday morning, Malfoy hasn’t come home from work. Harry went to sleep late, waiting up for him, and he finds himself rising late too. He’s surprised, for the first time, to wake up alone. It’s not a nice surprise.

After showering and dressing in the flat, still alone, Harry makes his way downstairs. There’s a couple of hours before lunch. He thinks that he and Ron can play chess; he can lose and they can talk about nothing.

He finds himself pausing on the stairwell, lingering a few stairs from the first-floor landing. He can hear noise from the library, and he can imagine his mum and dad inside. There’s the sound of the radio – a gobstones match, Harry thinks, being told in tedious, earnest commentary. His dad is offering remarks in response (“Oh, that’s not allowed…”). It’s only because he loves the sound of his own voice, but it makes Harry’s mum laugh in a distracted sort of way, which makes Harry’s chest turn over itself.

He imagines changing course; he imagines sitting in the library with them. He imagines his dad sitting back into one of the armchairs with his hands behind his head, feet on the footstool. His mum will be writing letters at the desk, which is hers these days despite being a Black antique, ebony inlaid with bone. She’ll be sitting there with parchment, quill and violet ink, Harry imagines, a few completed letters folded up beside her and another tall stack of sorted correspondence.

Harry doesn’t get anything like as much post as his mum. It’s because he only writes back to people he knows.

The room’s four walls are full of bookshelves, no windows as the library is lost in the central stretch of the house. There’s the desk and two armchairs with a leather-topped cabinet between them. The cabinet conceals a decanter of scotch, which refills from no one knows where. Hermione’s long suspected that it’s something to do with an odd payment on the accounts. There’s a table for four inlaid with a white-and-green marble chessboard, which Ron found in the garden and fixed up.

That’s five spare chairs, Harry counts.

Taking the last few steps down to the landing, Harry’s hand rests on the newel post. He wants to go into the library and apologise, for everything he’s ever said and everything he’s ever done. He wants to ask his mum and dad if they think that Sirius will forgive him, if they have any idea where Professor Lupin might have gone. He wants them to tell him when Draco’s coming home.

He’s tired; he didn’t sleep well. He wants to go back to March and start everything all over again.

He’s not going to go in, Harry knows. If he did he’d only ever end up shouting, and they wouldn’t tell him anything. The thought is exhausting. He should be going back upstairs, really. There’s a new textbook for OWLs to mark up and make sense of for September, which is due once more in a couple of weeks.

Abruptly, then, the gobstones match breaks out into applause. It’s cut off sharply, Harry expects by the flick of his father’s wand. “I’ve had enough,” comes the sound of his voice, plain and clear. “I’m flooing Andromeda.”

Harry stalls on the stairwell.

There’s the sound of his mother tutting. Her voice doesn’t carry as well as his dad’s, but she’s sitting, surely, in line with the doorway. “No you’re not, James,” she says absently, as though still concentrating on a letter, writing a G. “Teddy’ll be there.”

There’s the sound of someone huffing. “I don’t know where else Padfoot could be. He’ll be lying in a ditch, sozzled off his face –”

Soundlessly, Harry sits down on the striped runner of the stairs and he imagines himself a child, listening.

“Let him fall in a ditch if he wants,” his mum’s saying, obtuse. “He’ll be home soon enough to tell you about it.”

“He’ll be buying that motorbike,” his dad insists, forthright. “He’s no need for it,” he says. “All we’ll have now is him complaining that it isn’t his old one.”

“Such is life,” says Harry’s mum. Silence hangs for a few seconds, and his dad huffs again, before – “Come and help me, why don’t you?” his mum suggests. “If this is what you’re going to be like.”

“What are you writing?” There’s the sound of shuffling, and Harry imagines his dad standing up, curling around his mum at the desk and reading over her shoulder, because they’re ever touchy-feely. “ _Describe your ideal romantic evening…_ ” comes his dad’s voice, pronouncing.

“It’s an interview for _Witch Weekly_ –”

Harry’s dad cuts over this, incredulous. “ _A quiet night in with…_ Absolute bollocks!” he declares, laughing. Harry feels indignant on his mother’s behalf, but also something else; he’s not sure what. “Spoilt rotten like a princess, that’s you. Give that over –”

The squabble which follows is easy to imagine, and Harry can almost see his father pulling his mother more closely to him, quill seized, ruining whatever she was drafting with a scored line and printed, damning capitals.

“ _CHAMPAGNE SUPPER_ ,” he declares, and he’ll be holding the quill with his left hand, most likely, though Harry’s sure that he’s seen him cast with his right. “ _BOX SEATS._ ” Harry imagines that he can hear it being underlined. “Done. What’s next?”

“Oh, stop it,” Harry’s mum complains, but she isn’t really complaining. “I spent ages…”

“ _In a world where your husband doesn’t exist – wink…_ ” his dad reads out next, and Harry can hear his indignation. “What is this?” he demands.

“It’s _Witch Weekly_ ,” explains his mum again, smug.

“ _Describe your ideal man,_ ” his dad finishes. “Well, fine,” he says. It’s all a game, and Harry can see the definite way he would dip the quill back in the ink. “What do we say, Lily Potter?” he asks her, seducing, ignoring the interview’s instructions. His attention isn’t on what he’s writing, so likely he’s scribbling. “ _Handsome_ , yes.” He underlines it, surely. “ _Athletic_ ,” he agrees with himself. “ _Good fun_.”

Harry’s mother is laughing again. “Completely up himself,” she suggests, but it isn’t actually an insult.

“ _Confident_ ,” his dad agrees, one arm still wrapped around her shoulders, now squeezing. He murmurs something into her ear, making her shriek.

Harry blinks, the noise cutting through him. It’s right there, he tries to tell himself. They’re both right there.

The stairwell and landing are empty, though, and Harry can’t see into the library from where he sits.

There’s giggling, but then his mother is tutting, her voice floating with good humour, musical. “James, no one wants to hear about _you_ ,” she says, and Harry imagines her stealing the quill back. “It’s _Witch Weekly_ ,” his mum says again, as though Harry’s dad hasn’t got the point. “People want to imagine me lusting after Padfoot, torn between the man I really love and the father of my children. But oh –” She poses this dramatically. “Which one’s which?”

The idea, Harry guesses, is that Harry’s mum offers a vague description of her ideal man which so happens to match Sirius more than Harry’s dad, and readers’ imaginations take care of the rest. It's a joke on their filthy minds.

“Children plural?” Harry’s dad is quoting, oddly serious, as though the rest is unimportant. Harry thinks that this could have been 1985, 86. This could have been his life, sitting on the stairs, the Dursleys only ever a perfunctory visit at Christmas. He finds that he’s biting his nails.

His mum sighs, and Harry doesn’t know how to take in what she’s saying. “I told you, I’m working on it,” she doesn’t complain. “It’s a womb, not a top hat.”

“It’ll be me that’s the problem,” his father says ruefully. “It’ll be just like Dad said – my window will have closed around the age of twenty-three. These days I’ll be about as virile as a…” He makes a sound like a splat.

“Look, you did your job last time,” Harry’s mum tells him, making Harry wrinkle his nose. “There’s no point worrying –“

“Who said I was worried?”

At least the headlines are wrong, Harry supposes. He sets his hands down on his knees, a nail hurting where he’s torn it.

His mum is sighing, as though his dad must be worried after all. It’s strange, Harry thinks, to imagine his dad caring about his sperm count. It explains why he reacts to Sirius’s digs against his manliness. They don’t seem harmless, now that Harry thinks about it.

He thinks about Lupin, traitorously mocking Sirius’s manliness back. And then bringing it up again.

“What d’you reckon, then?” says Harry’s mum, as though a change of subject is needed. There’s the sound of a feather tapping on parchment, as Harry imagines it. “Do I set the housewives of Britain aflutter with the idea that Padfoot isn’t only innocent, isn’t only hunky again, but is also up for a bit of extramarital _you know what I mean?_ ”

“Mm,” says Harry’s dad unenthusiastically.

“James, you’re allowed to disagree with me.” This statement comes as a surprise.

“Another time, lovely, I think,” Harry’s dad doesn’t disagree, and Harry imagines him kissing his wife on the temple in apology, patronising but also very nice.

The point here takes Harry by surprise too – but then, he’s never known Sirius, has he?

“After all the rubbish about Harry – and Harry _pushing_ it…”

There’s a shiver that runs up Harry’s spine, whenever his dad says his name. It doesn’t sound like his own, in his dad’s voice; it’s like he’s talking about someone else, someone better, a more lovable son, posh like him, like Justin Finch-Fletchley, who keeps up with the muggle world… Harry doesn’t like it at all.

“Did you talk to him?” asks Harry’s mum now, sounding closed off and serious, out of character.

“I told him off,” says James, self-mocking. “I’m not sure what else I should have said.” He quotes himself, in this other conversation, “ _My beautiful son, you’ve clearly inherited your mother’s insight and the ability to cut one to the quick. Do consider using your powers for good._ ”

“That wasn’t me,” says Lily darkly, and Harry finds himself clutching his knees. “That was Petunia, talking to our dad after Mom –”

“It was in no way Petunia,” now James says emphatically, as though they’ve already been over this. “He didn’t mean a word of it.” He sounds certain, with no doubts at all, and that’s more than Harry feels.

“Tuney never…” Lily’s voice is low, even calculating, private. Harry feels like a voyeur, but he doesn’t stand up. “I worry about him all the time,” she tells James, not finishing her thoughts.

“He loves us,” states James categorically.

“James –”

Too hot, Harry feels something burning and intense like shame. “That strength of feeling?” James is deducing. “We’d never be allowed near the wards if he hated us; they’re written with the very core of him. It’s elemental, my dear Lily.”

“ _Elementary_ , James, you dingbat –”

It’s as though Harry can see James waving this off, entirely unruffled.

Lily lets him off the hook, undoubtedly grinning, though the sound of it fades. “At least they’ve stopped writing…” Harry doesn’t know what they’ve been writing. “When I think about what was done to Sev; how he put it in that speech… _Bravery._ ”

It was in all the papers, Harry supposes, swallowing.

“Yes,” says James shortly, and it makes no sense at all. “I fear that Minerva may have learned her lesson about letting me into her office, or I’m not sure I would…”

Confused, Harry’s not sure what this refers to.

Lily titters, a little wickedly, but always kind-natured. “But she said that the kids are behind him?” she checks with James, as though on a different subject, her tone firm and direct.

“No one raised anything with their head of house before the end of term,” James counts off, and Harry has a prickling suspicion that he does in fact know what they’re talking about. “There have been a few letters from parents, but only the usual suspects… The OWLers and the NEWTers have done excellently. _Again_.”

There’s a rush in Harry’s stomach at this, because he thought that the results looked OK, but he wasn’t sure –

“It’s a different time,” James concludes, and Harry imagines him shrugging.

And yet Lily draws in a shuddering breath. “I get all these old biddies asking me – and I tell them _no_ , he’s my _son_ , and even if he wasn’t…”

With a deep breath as though recovering himself, James huffs and speaks like himself, proud and uncompromising, entirely changing the subject. “You should describe Moony as your ideal man,” he suggests, and Harry imagines him nodding at the parchment on the desk to get them back on track. “Let the world wonder. If they happen to be aware… All the better,” he says firmly. He moves to a joke, “He has form on seducing nubile witches…”

“ _Nubile_ ,” mocks Harry’s mum, as though she knows what this means.

And Harry can imagine what the old biddies are saying. He’s never thought about this angle – the way that Rita Skeeter’s pen might turn. He’s never thought that the kids at Hogwarts might turn against him, but given how quickly his year used to turn on anything…

It makes no sense; it’s all nonsense. What is this world in which James Potter and Harry’s mum talk to the press and are friends with Lee Jordan and answer letters from all the weird fans and do interviews for _Witch Weekly_ , like Lockhart?

“There’s a little nerve inside him that likes you –”

Lily’s laughing again; they’re talking about Lupin. “James, you think everyone –”

“Granted, it’s never been as strong as the one which sees Padfoot and makes him want to roll over – perish the thought – but it’ll give him a –”

“What am I supposed to say?” demands Lily, traitorously amused. “ _Oh yeah, cagey and flakey, that does it for me…_ ”

James tuts, and they’re flirting again. Harry can imagine them looking at each other, his mum sitting at the Blacks’ bone-inlaid desk with a glint in her green eyes.

“You are a cruel woman, Lily Janet,” James says, and he won’t mean it, Harry thinks, or he’d never accept it being said. “The words are _mysterious_ and _elusive_ and _complex_.”

“Mm,” Lily makes a sound of mock-distaste. She’s turning back to the desk. “Sounds like the guff on the back of a bottle of wine.”

James snorts, apparently enchanted. “It does not,” he says loyally. “It sounds like a gentleman thief.”

“All right, Padfoot,” Lily humours him. There’s the scratch of her quill, presumably scrubbing out James’s earlier interventions. “Though really,” she adds. “Have you never thought about going after someone more stable?”

“I’m already taken,” James says smugly, as himself, and Harry wrinkles his nose.

Lily only sighs passingly, cutting him down, and she’s apparently already back to her writing. “James, you’re not attractive,” she says, presumably lying. “You’re speccy. Your shoulders are narrow.”

Entirely playacting, James huffs.

A few moments longer, he’ll be watching his wife, and then he declares – “Right! I’m doing weeding.” As though he can’t possibly stay still, maybe something else.

Quickly, Harry climbs to his feet and he turns, dashing up and out of sight, socks on the stair runner.

“It will be entirely absorbing, and when I look up there’ll be a dog dragging home a beast on a chariot of fire.”

“Yes there will,” Lily agrees.

“Until such a moment, they can take turns as the knobbly ones,” James mutters to himself as he leaves.

Right in time for Harry to catch this, a figure comes out of the library, and it looks like a glimpse that Harry could catch of himself in a mirror. It heads down the landing, away from where Harry watches.

He watches it go.

“Oh no!” then Lily’s calling through the door, even as the figure’s gone downstairs. There’s movement, as though she might be standing in the library’s doorway. “Do the mowing! The grass, James!” she shouts, with a cutting short A. “It needs being done!”

 _“Yea,”_ some sort of positive noise comes back from the depths of the house.

Harry’s left standing on the stairs.

James will be going after his mates, whether now or later. It’s the sort of thing that he does (“Your father would have done the same for me.”). Harry wants to help him, maybe, or give him advice. Something else; he’s not sure. The man was captured by Voldemort, once upon a time. It took him twenty-three days to escape.

That’s a long time, Harry thinks, professionally.

And the thing is, it’s easy. Harry draws his wand and takes his shirt, severing a spare wooden button from the washing instructions. He doesn’t much like plastic, even on muggle things, and it’s useful for this – because he transfigures the button to a tiny Rita Skeeter beetle. He carves the right runes to make it show up on at least one of the maps in his backpack.

He moves silently downstairs to watch his refracted image go out into the garden from the dining room. It’s easy; it’s a first-year spell to hover the thing through the window into James Potter’s hair, sticky with whatever concentration of Sleakeazy’s it is that he uses. The man ruffles his fingers at the itch, but the wooden beetle has bristly legs and it’s only the size of a button, so Harry knows that it’s not coming out. He knows this hair and how it works.

Giving up itching, James takes in the lawn and starts casting the mowing spell, and it’s rubbish, shearing unpredictable patches to unpredictable heights, testing anyone’s patience. Mowing’s a job for house elves, the gardening books say. But Kreacher’s run off his feet. They should have long bought Grimmo something petrol-powered and muggle, like Arthur Weasley, but they’ve never got round to it.

The spell’s entirely rubbish, Harry remembers as he watches it in action. There’s no way that James will keep at the activity for long. There’s no way that anyone could; it’s frustrating just watching him –

Thoughts turning, eventually, to what it would take to create a better mowing spell, Harry’s still watching when Ron swings around the dining room’s doorframe.

“There you are, mate,” he says, making Harry startle and look at him. “You stalking your dad now?” he asks, not entirely joking.

“Not stalking if I’m not invisible,” Harry insists, shaking himself and turning away from the window. He’ll leave it open, he thinks. It’d look weird if he closed it.

Ron looks sceptical, wearing casual Sunday robes. He has to wear robes, if there’s no reason not to; he might get called in. “Law’s not on your side there,” he points out.

Harry shrugs. He’s never been one for laws. It’s one of the reasons that he would have made a terrible auror.

Rolling his eyes, Ron nods towards upstairs. “Hermione’s looking at weddings on the Turnynet,” he explains, and he’s brilliant, Ron, because he doesn’t mention Lupin or Sirius or Harry kicking off at all. His question follows naturally: “Pub?”

It is Sunday, Harry thinks. “Aren’t I supposed to be helping Hermione?” He hasn’t quite got this sorted in his head, but he understands that Draco’s Ron’s best man and he’s some sort of very manly chief bridesmaid.

 _First mate,_ he hears himself agreeing with them. He’s the bride’s first mate, and Hermione’s the captain, and the wedding will be like they’re on a voyage after buried treasure (“If that’s how you want to imagine it, Harry.”).

As for the Turnynet – Harry knows that it has a proper muggle name, but he can never remember what it is. Hermione will be in the drawing room, where she keeps her beast of a laptop with the whiskey glasses. She has a little table, to sit with it on the sofa. They named the thing Crookshanks, in memoriam.

Ron’s expression plainly says, _It’s your funeral._ “She’s got the notebook out,” is how he phrases it. “Can’t decide on her favourite _aesthetic_.”

The notebook promises a lot of things, none of which is enjoyable. “What’s she worrying for?” Harry asks anyway, off-hand, not thinking about it at all. “She’ll want classic wedding, the most wedding-y wedding there was. White silk and crystal and silver...” He shakes his head. “ _Gold,_ ” he corrects, interrupting himself. “Lots of flowers,” he decides. The vision of it, for some reason, comes to him perfectly. “Vaguely tropical, but still a country garden. Nothing too heavy and nothing too drippy and nothing too over-the-top.”

A bolt of laughter comes out of Ron, and it is utterly wonderful to see him so happy, his face heavily freckled with the summer, affection sparkling in his eyes.

Harry gives him the look anyway, because he’s embarrassing himself.

Playing his part, Ron shakes his head in mock-exasperation. “We’re not going to get there until the options are rationalised,” he points out, and Harry nods to agree. “Besides,” Ron allows. “Classic wedding sounds a lot like Gin’s.”

“Nah,” Harry says, his gaze slipping to the side of the door. “Everyone uses that hotel outside Hogsmeade. There’s no romance to it.”

“Bit harsh,” Ron tells him, a twitch pulling at his grin.

Harry shrugs.

“Come on,” Ron says again, pulling Harry’s eyes back to his face. His expression is sarcastic, a challenge. “I know you miss him, but you can’t spend all day pining for Malfoy.” He’s still holding onto the doorframe.

And Harry does miss Malfoy. He always misses Malfoy, and they’ve just spent the week in each other’s pockets (“We can stay another night if you like, but you realise that you’ll have to get off me, so that I can use the Fone?”). “I think he’s up to something,” Harry says, for the joke, ignoring the fact that Ron never used to call it pining.

Because it’s a very long-running joke, Ron grins, ducking his head. “So many ways to make that dodgy, mate,” he says, before nodding back towards the hall. “We’ll get a pint and hassle George,” he prods, knocking on wood. “Your mum’s written letters; he knows what’s going on.”

“All right.” Harry gives in. He glances out to the garden again, where his dad is still going with the mowing spell. It was Dominic Granger who suggested the petrol mower to Arthur. No electricity; no interference. They can work around that in Grimmo these days, but it’s easier not to have to. “Have you talked to your mum about the wedding?” he asks Ron, trying not to make it an issue.

“What part of it?” Ron asks him, frowning, halfway out the door. “I can’t get a word in edgeways,” he goes on, not really defensive, though Harry looks for it. “She’s ecstatic – Bill keeps telling me…”

Harry has a lot of time for Bill. He likes to think that Fleur and Malfoy would get on, if they ever had reason to cross paths. Malfoy could talk to the children in French, Harry thinks, if not Fleur too, and Fleur would like that. “Hermione said that you told her about waiting till after the baby,” he says to Ron. He hasn’t forgotten this.

“Well, yeah,” Ron agrees, crossing his arms and leaning against the doorframe. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asks, as though Harry might disagree. “No point rushing.”

“She’ll want to push the date up,” Harry tells him, talking about Molly, because she’s lovely, but this is predictable. He’s the bride’s first mate; it’s his job to anticipate these things. “It’ll be her only grandchild out of wedlock.”

“Oh, it’s not really out of wedlock…” Ron says, looking away, scratching his long nose. He looks back. “Is it?”

Harry shrugs, because he’s not sure how this stuff works, though he knows that a lot of people care. “Ask Draco,” he suggests, never noticing it. “I don’t think that you get relief for being engaged.”

“Right, then…” Ron grimaces, wry. “This is going to go well.”

For some reason, Harry feels the need to stress this. He scratches the back of his neck, which is itchy. “You can’t let her tell Hermione that she needs to move the date up.”

Ron sighs, looking to the ceiling. “I don’t have control over these things,” he insists. Catching Harry’s expression, his ears go a little pink. “I’m not going to tell her that we’ll _do_ it,” he promises.

“She’ll make it an argument about feminism,” Harry points out about Hermione, because it’s obvious, “but it won’t be that, will it? She’ll want to give Dominic and Ange at least six months’ notice.”

A muscle ticks in Ron’s jaw, the way it always does when they talk about Dominic and Ange. “We’re still calling them her mum and dad,” he instructs.

And Harry agrees, most of the time. “They’re still calling themselves the Wilkinses,” he says out loud, today, because Ron needs this spelled out. He’s always had Molly and Arthur; he doesn’t know. “They’re not interested. I was listening in on their crap reaction to the engagement –”

“Hermione was fine with it –”

“And you waited till she would be,” Harry tells Ron, because he knows him. His ears glow redder, the blush creeping onto his face. “She’s a dream that they had,” Harry pushes, “and that’s it. They’ve not made the trip before now, and your mum needs to give Hermione her own time to accept that they won’t make the wedding. Not if we’re planning to have it in this hemisphere. And Hermione’ll want that,” Harry stresses, “because this is her home.”

His voice has become a little short by this point. Ron frowns at him, and he lets the rant burn out.

“Mate, are you all right?” Ron asks when silence has settled, choosing his moment.

Hermione's certain that she’s the reason why her parents have never come back to Britain, not even to visit. She made the charm repelling them too strong, she says. She was trying to protect them. She was young.

“I’m fine,” Harry tells Ron, forcing some sort of smile.

“He’ll be back later,” Ron says, and it takes Harry a moment to realise that he’s talking about Malfoy. “Always comes back, doesn’t he? Can’t get rid of him. I think he fancies you,” Ron pushes, his expression mock-bemused.

For once it makes Harry laugh, rather desperately.

“Pub,” Ron tells him for the last time, and they’re going.

* * *

That night, Harry dreams of the Mirror of Erised. Again. Not for the first time.

The dreams are always the same. He’s at school and it’s night; he’s invisible. He finds the classroom, hidden, and he slips inside. The mirror is there, just as it always was, and he knows that he’s free to spend the night looking at it. He comes closer to the golden frame and it doesn’t matter that he’s wearing his cloak. It’s necessary: he can only find the classroom if he’s invisible.

The air is cool, late at night. The room’s walls are stone.

There’s a boy in the frame looking back at him. He doesn’t look much like Harry anymore, his eyes too wide-open and curious, his hair too big for his ears. He stands between a mother and a father, who look exactly as they do in the waking world. The father seems tall, because the son is not long eleven and his wife is shorter than him by several inches. She’s slighter in much the same way. The father’s hair is like the boy’s and he has quick hazel eyes. The mother’s eyes are green like the sea.

Nowadays, in this dream, Harry makes better sense of the family standing at these parents’ shoulders. There are relatives – so many of them, young and old – but there’s also a man who’s not the father’s cousin. His hair is equally dark and thick, but it’s longer, curling loosely where it’s tucked behind his ears; his features are sharper, haughty somehow. His expression is wicked, and he comes by that honestly. There’s another man who isn’t the mother’s cousin, though he has the same looming stature and blondish brown hair as her sister, when the sister hasn’t dyed it true blonde. His height doesn’t come from his neck but from his legs, and his eyes are a startling yellow-brown, rather than uncertain and pale.

The faces of this family and its forebears don’t seem strange, as Harry looks between them. What’s strange is the boy stood in front of them.

Harry is aware of himself, in the dream – well enough to recognise that he looks far less like the boy than the dad, standing in front of the mirror.

It was a strange desire that he felt at eleven, he reflects every time in the dream, to see himself in the immediate impossible moment. To see an image that he could only ever grow out of. His desire wasn’t a dream of discovery, a fantasy for what could come next, but for his own world to be unreal, for himself to exist in another.

Ron’s vision was not at all the same, Harry sees. His desire was something that he could grow into, which he could surpass when the moment came. Ron would see something different at the age of twenty-eight, Harry’s sure, though it would be no less ambitious. He would be muddling his way towards it without letting on, just as he was at eleven, and he would be setting himself up to discover new dreams, more real achievements, believing that they might well be possible.

His desire right now, Harry expects, would look a lot like Harry’s vision in the mirror, only Ron would be the dad, not the boy, and he would be ten years older, a dream of himself. He and Hermione plainly want a girl – even if they’re waiting to be surprised – so that would be different too. A girl and a sibling for her to look after, and that sibling would be here.

Sometimes, when Harry dreams of the Mirror of Erised, he thinks that his vision was like Ron’s after all: a dream for what could be in the future. Now he’s arrived at the moment of truth. He sees two people the age he is now, one with his hair and one with his eyes, one with a lovely wife and one with a tall, straight-backed husband. He sees two men on the periphery, coming together and coming apart, one with black hair and one with blond, one emancipated from his childhood and the other teaching in spite of its scars.

Harry doesn’t know which one of them he ever wanted to be, in his dreams. He only knows that he doesn’t quite look like any of them. He knows a boy with dark hair too big for his ears, with eyes wide and curious and startling in colour, almost the age of the boy at the centre of the image. He would let Harry stand at his shoulder, at least for long enough to take a photograph. But he would never stand staring for hours, not just to see _Harry_. Not the way that Harry does to see these other people, in his dreams as in the past.

Like the seasons, Harry thinks – like an eclipse, like an astronomical event – the moment of the Mirror of Erised comes but once in twenty years, and Harry’s fucked it all up. His chance is long gone. Sometimes he thinks about this upon waking. Sometimes he’s not thinking of anything, too busy reaching for water while his heart pounds, because the dream ends a different way, his hands burning chimaeras, unknown dangers pressing in behind his head.

* * *

By Monday, the next morning, Harry’s forgotten about his transfigured button – but then he wakes to the sound of his dad clattering up and down stairs. He’ll be in from a run, Harry imagines, and he’ll be about to discover Harry’s beetle in the shower.

Without any sort of plan, Harry rolls out of bed, and Draco’s there behind him, out for the count and murmuring, frowning, to feel Harry leave. “Shh, love,” Harry tells him, rolling back, forgetting that they’re having a row and that he should feel something other than affection. He strokes hair off his face and pulls up the duvet, planting a kiss near his nose.

Fitfully asleep, Draco makes a noise in response, but he settles as much as he ever does, hunching up into his knees.

Harry goes out to the landing, walking himself into yesterday’s jeans. His dad is clattering down from upstairs. “You haven’t seen your godfather, have you?” he asks, and he looks almost disturbed. He doesn’t seem to notice that Harry’s still buttoning.

“Did he not come back?” Harry asks, not sure what he feels, missing the faint feeling of laughter in his throat. His stomach is dropping away.

Stinking of sweat, and Harry’s not much better, his dad pulls him close and kisses him hard on the hair, always forgiving. Harry doesn’t complain, because he forgets to remember that he should. He can be slow in the mornings. “I’ll have him home by lunchtime,” his dad promises, before leaving to rattle downstairs.

Harry’s feelings come belatedly, with sick, intense embarrassment. He doesn’t know why he was taken in, for that moment. James Potter can’t promise anything. He can’t forgive him, and he can’t be his –

He can’t quite convince himself, this early.

Moving silently back to the flat, Harry finds his watch: it’s barely dawn, not even six o’clock yet. He moves to the wardrobe for another solution to his father, rooting around in his bag for his map and his cloak.


	9. Another world, part 3

The morning light is bright and sharp as Harry squints into it, apparating from Grimmo to a pavement in Highgate, invisible.

There’s a road to one side of him, railings on the other, and Harry’s sure that his father is inside their domain. He can’t see where, but that makes sense.

It’s a cemetery, inside. Highgate Cemetery, the famous one. This is an odd corner of it, somewhere off the tourist trail that rarely gets seen. There’s a box hedge butting up against the convex run of railings, and there’s a beech tree, the trunk gnarled and coppiced while the leaf-bearing branches swoop above.

To get here, Harry’s followed the London A-Z in his hand. It’s turned to the page for Chester Road, N1, and this is the bottom of the hill.

Closing the paperback and shoving it in his back pocket, Harry knows what to do. He keeps his wand high and taps it one-two-three on the railings, the second picket over from the post, three along and then two. The sound hangs suspended in one stately soft beating chord and the railings are growing taller, the spearhead finials rising grandly as the brick base sinks to reveal two gentle steps. With a pause and a gasp, the finials rise a final inch and turn like a platoon on parade, chinking down.

The iron turns verdant, the black-grey dark green. The railings curve in a great arch between brick supports under the sky, tipped with their glinting spearheads. As they thicken, there’s revealed a wide double gate with a latch, bars embellishing with wrought ivy and stars. The hedge slinks away from the cemetery courtyard, while the beech remains looming in welcome – greener, if that’s possible.

 _Beyond the veil lies eternity,_ letters promise in a high curve.

Returning his wand to his pocket with the map, Harry lets the gate open for him, his invisibility cloak heavy on his shoulders and over his head. There are no snakes to beg, but behind him the gate closes softly, vegetation now more than iron.

Passing through, the sight ahead of Harry is transformed from what it might have been. Trees remain, overgrown for August, but the crooked, half-buried muggle tombstones which might have been seen through the hedge have disappeared. Instead, the cemetery rambles ahead of him with all sorts of markers, pale gravel paths marking ways through the woods among family plots and individual wizarding graves.

There are marble fairy rings of toadstools, plaques at their centre and the bold threat of protection; great stone spheres carved with runes; statues and statues of likenesses; tall, thin obelisks growing taller with every birth and death in the family, branched like cactuses. The air is cool and calm with the morning, the dead waiting, the early sun cut by many leaves as Harry sets off to walk among them.

Highgate is the most prestigious wizarding cemetery in Britain. Andromeda explained this to Harry when they were making arrangements for Tonks and Lupin’s funeral. She would bury her husband, her daughter and her son-in-law with the Blacks, Andromeda said, because they were her family and this was her right (“And I am not ashamed.”).

Kreacher threw a fit. Not about young Nymphadora.

Malfoy would call it immaculate vengeance, served cold, Harry expects, if he ever expressed a view more explicitly than raising an eyebrow. Himself, Harry can only imagine the crypt’s occupants at a long antique dinner table, Ted laughing as Tonks tells a joke and the Blacks sitting bitter and funereal. He used to imagine Lupin looking down at his soup and not meeting anyone’s eyes. He’s never been sure how to feel about it.

The problem is, after all, that putting Lupin, Ted and Tonks in with the others means dealing with Walburga Black’s curse. Unless she is paid the proper respect, visitors to the Black mausoleum are struck by an itchy red rash which won’t die back fully for weeks.

Harry’s always meant to ask Bill to take a look at the curse, because he’s never worked out what counts as the proper respect, and he stopped trying at the start of 1999. It was the same time that he resorted to giving Walburga’s portrait the silent treatment (“MUDBLOOD LOVER; HALFBLOOD SCUM! CAN’T EVEN LOOK ME IN THE EYE!”).

Today, James Potter is off a way in the distance. He’s choosing a familiar fork in the path, when Harry catches up with him. Under the cloak, Harry moves as quickly and as quietly as he’s able. He leaves the gravel for grass, eventually, skirting markers and trees, silently apologising to everyone under the soil and hoping that this is enough.

The Black plot lies a long way into the cemetery, up the gentle hill. James doesn’t quite make it to the top. In the deepest part of the wizarding woods he’s waylaid by a dark, hunched-up figure on a bench. It’s a man looking down at his hands, and he’s scratching the back of one of them roughly, worrying a nail with his teeth, scratching again.

This Black was never buried with the rest, and his name was never added to the stone. He’s the one who would have kicked Lupin out of his stupor with the soup, Harry used to think, before he realised, as he now does, that Sirius’s presence at dinner with Tonks would only ever have made Lupin feel more awkward.

“ _Bop,_ ” James says now, breaking into Harry’s thoughts. He’s tapping Sirius on the head with his wand. It’s a gentle wind-up, in keeping with the sober surroundings, but it makes Sirius jump. “Fancy meeting you here,” James says when Sirius looks up, tucking his wand into the back of his shorts. He sounds smug, as though he’s solved a puzzle. His expression says more, cutting and fond.

He's unrecognisable, Sirius, Harry thinks. _Hunky again,_ his mum said. That’s partly it, though the description doesn’t quite apply today. Sirius looks rough, his hair thick and greasy. Harry imagines that he might have slept under the bench as a dog. Exhaustion is a shadow over his face, and it makes Harry’s heart lurch awfully in his chest.

“Do I know you?” he’s asking James, frowning, absently scratching the back of his hand. He’s short-tempered and acerbic, without any patience at all. Joking anyway. A bird rustles through a tree not far from them, escaping to sweep through the air.

“I thought that we might have gone to school together,” says James, crossing his arms. Harry thinks that he should roll his eyes at this ridiculous game. He doesn’t. “Potter. 78. Gryffindor. Charmed,” James inevitably finishes, flashing a grin.

“And you bopped me on the head for, what?” Sirius raises his eyebrows with the question. “Are you trying to pick me up?” His sexuality is a sinful suggestion, darkening the flirtatious cock of his head. There’s an arrogant set to his shoulders as he slouches, and Harry can only imagine Molly Weasley’s face.

“I thought that you might give out sweets,” James immediately throws back, not commenting on this. He might know, as Harry does, that this is in no way how Sirius genuinely flirts.

In any case, he presumably means like some sort of machine in a pub. There’s a couple that work with a wand in the Leaky. Having broken the ice, James is sitting down, hooking his elbows over the back of the bench and stretching out his legs, only wearing his gym kit. He’s all cocky sexuality too. It’s disturbing – though Malfoy’s said when they were speaking that he’s sure the man is straight (“As a broomstick; dear Merlin.”).

“Maybe some jellybeans,” James is musing, leaning over to signal the joke.

“Only to small children and teenage boys.” Sirius’s tone is dark and dry and it belongs to someone else. “I have a predilection, you see.”

James gives him a look for this, sighing. Harry struggles to prevent himself tripping on a tree root, coming to a pause not far from where they’re sitting.

“He was only trying to get a reaction,” says James eventually, carefully, talking about Harry.

And Harry’s chest burns when Sirius replies plainly, “It worked.”

James looks up towards the sky. “Padfoot, how many times have you done the same thing?” he suggests, oddly calm in Sirius’s presence, and Harry doesn’t know him. “It’s a test,” he states gently, categorically. “He’s pushing you to see if you’ll leave him.”

“I did,” comes Sirius’s simple reply.

This isn’t right, Harry thinks, but it’s not as though he can say anything about it.

James and Sirius are quiet now, for a while, sitting in the stew of their own egos. Off down a path behind them, where Harry can see, there’s an old witch wearing black with a hat, bustling in and out of view as she cleans a sandstone rendition of a gingerbread house, trellised with roses. The roses are blooming peach yellow in the cool morning sun.

Harry imagines himself choking, if he tried to come closer to the two men on the bench. Shrinking. Somehow vanishing into the air. No one would know that it had happened; he’s invisible. He imagines revealing himself, and they’re the ones who disappear.

Eventually, as Harry watches, Sirius makes a face, screwing up his nose. He lifts up a knee to hold it in front of him, looking down the path with his cheek to his kneecap. He looks young. “What are you doing here, James?” he asks dismissively.

“Looking for you,” comes the reply. “There I was, running in the glory of the morning, and I thought to myself, what’s that gloomy fucker Padfoot likely to be doing? Of course!” he answers himself brightly. “Chasing after the only fucker in the world with claim on being gloomier.”

“I found him,” says Sirius, nodding further up the path, and it’s not nice, what he’s saying. “Remus John Lupin, 1960 to 1998. You’ll want to head off the crowds.”

It’s some sort of joke about celebrity graves, Harry thinks. Or Lupin’s general lack of friends, support in the paper. It’s in poor taste.

“An aficionado, are you?” James proposes anyway, picking up on this and pushing. He turns on the bench and crosses a leg over his knee, tucking his hand underneath it. “I like the early work. It’s always nice to meet another –”

With an frustrated sigh, he’s interrupted. “Oh, fuck off.”

The derision in Sirius’s tone makes Harry startle, an old response from childhood that he’s never been able to repress. He doesn’t know why Sirius has come here. It’s like he’s punishing himself. Harry would never have thought that this is where he’d come.

There’s a pause, silence between the figures on the bench which James doesn’t break, for some reason, though he seems utterly unmoved by the swearing. He merely looks past Sirius and up the hill.

Eventually, Sirius speaks again. “It’s a ridiculous name,” he says, mulling on this. “Deeply unattractive.” Again, he’s startlingly open and at the same time everything’s a joke. Again, all Harry can imagine is Molly’s reaction, flustered. “Whatever possessed me to take up with a man named _Remus?_ ” he asks, hissing the S as though it disgusts him.

“Oh, and he’s back,” James says lightly, addressing some sort of imagined audience. He’s such a prat, Harry wants to tell someone, and yet he knows that he wouldn’t be believed. These aren’t Sirius’s thoughts, he doesn’t think, but he can’t put his finger on why. James should know.

“It was all a mistake,” Sirius carries on, as though to himself, and Harry doesn’t know whether this version of him isn’t just as bad. “I should have gone after Dockers Dearborn,” he mourns, sounding exhausted.

“Dockers Dearborn?” The name makes James laugh, scratching up the back of his hair, not catching Harry’s beetle. He looks perplexed, his expression a caricature of the emotion. “Where’s he come from?”

“Little me was in love with Dockers Dearborn,” Sirius insists, plainly talking nonsense. “Head over heels.”

“You were twelve,” scoffs James.

Sirius grins, as though this is neither here nor there. “And he was a _man_ ,” he says, sounding amused by himself.

There’s an odd feeling in Harry’s chest, something like sadness and something like pity. He really doesn’t know what they’re on about. Dockers Dearborn is Caradoc, Neville’s uncle whose body was never found. But then –

“He had long hair and used to play Black Sabbath in the common room,” Sirius goes on, needling, and he makes Harry want to sit down and talk to him, somewhere in the depths of a cavernous house. “D’you remember? Alice Cooper,” he says, as though this memory is particularly fond.

“I remember it vividly,” James agrees shortly, narrowing his eyes.

“You thought that everything he played was the most unholy racket.” Pushing, Sirius’s expression glints with wickedness and he locates this joke’s punchline. “Completely fucking square,” he accuses.

“Thank you.”

Harry and Sirius had something close to the same conversation, once upon a time.

Point scored, anyway, Sirius cocks his head and moves on. “He was my idol,” he reflects, meaning Dockers, not really meaning it, somehow. “Looking back, you think I’d have realised – and you never did see him out on the town. He must’ve swung my way.”

“Your way plural,” James corrects, and all of a sudden they’re back on their earlier subject.

“Nah.” Sirius wrinkles his nose, changing gear without pause. “Remus was only gay in the eighties.” He says it definitively, darkly, and Harry finds himself blinking again. “I wasn’t on the scene and there was a _disease_ – I’ll tell you about it sometime.” His tone is dismissive, snide.

When he gets it, Harry isn’t sure he likes this joke. As though Lupin could only commit to something when it would hurt him. He imagines that Hermione would have something to say about it.

It makes James laugh, nonetheless, tilting up his chin to the sky, the grin on his face plainly a smirk. “What was he when you _were_ on the scene?” he asks disbelievingly.

“He was – oh, what do they call it? _Bi-curious_ ,” Sirius tells him, unimpressed, mocking. It earns another snatch of laughter, and Harry feels a tickle of shame. “We spent two years in the same fucking bed!” Sirius complains, and it’s the first word that Harry’s ever heard about it.

His voice carries well enough that it really should make the witch cleaning the cottage react, but she doesn’t seem to hear anything.

“Well,” says James, mock-sagely, unperturbed by Sirius raising his voice. “It takes a lot to sate Moony Lupin’s curiosity.”

“Mm.” Sirius’s tone is wry. “Which is how he ended up with a wife.”

Something colder than shame trickles into Harry’s chest. There’s another pause. The gentle sound of sweeping. The colour of the sky in early morning is the colour of Malfoy’s eyes, often, but this August sky is a clear and vivid blue.

The silence is filled by Sirius, idly, his tone even drier. “You know,” he says leadingly. “Every bisexual you met in our day was almost guaranteed to be lying.” He carries on delicately, “Typical fucking Moony, to be the only one who wasn’t.”

James looks at Sirius over the rims of his glasses, as though he’s finally caught on that something’s off. He tucks a hand between his knees, still crossed. “I thought that we were leaving the poor girl out of it,” he warns.

“Well, fuck it, Prongs, I hate her,” Sirius tells him, quite evenly, shrugging, vindictive. He starts scratching at his hand again, and Harry feels urgent to move. “I’m not glad she’s dead, because she was on our side and she was Dromeda’s and she was pleasant enough in a slightly boring, unjaundiced way…”

“Merlin save us if we need to be _jaundiced_ –”

“But I hate her and I hate Moony for shacking up with her and would it have been so hard for him to sleep with nothing but my _memory_ for twenty years?”

There’s something too guileless in the way that he’s saying this, Harry thinks. He’s joking, Sirius, somehow. He has to be. He’s winding up to a conclusion.

Swallowing, Harry finds himself creeping to the next tree closer, skirting past a tombstone in the shape of a sphinx. He wants to see the expressions on the pair’s faces, more clearly.

“He could have stayed quasi-virginal and lovelorn…” Sirius is going on, lamenting. “Just _waiting_ for me to show up in my innocence, and then he could have mourned me like a nineteenth-century widow, and I don’t think that these are unreasonable expectations.” He turns his head, giving James a look before he’s back to the trees. “Do you?”

James says nothing, sceptical on the bench, and Harry’s heart is in the wrong place. “What am I missing?” James asks then, dropping his head to his fist, as though they’re sharing nothing but gossip.

“Oh, sorry,” Sirius tells him, giving himself away with a smirk. His tone barely changes. “I thought that you were keeping up. I’m currently playing the Sirius Black who lives in Moony’s head.”

Harry pauses. The point of this sinks in.

You're such a _cock_ , Harry thinks, hot with anger.

And it’s so irritating, because his dad replies easily, ducking his head to hide his grin, barely reacting at all, dressed in his gym kit and talking to a man who’s slept rough. “Oh, I see.”

“Though I never found her that entertaining,” Sirius says now, scratching at his hand, and Harry wants him to say what he means, just for once. He’s looking down at his fingers, and his tone is impossible. “I mean, funny noses… There were more kicks to be had watching Harry throw a strop.”

“He throws a good strop,” agrees Harry’s dad promptly, and Harry wants nothing more than to shout at both of them.

“He used to remind me so much of you.” Sirius is confessing now, and Harry feels too hot. He’s too close, he knows; the heat must be radiating off him.

“He’s a better man than me,” says Harry’s dad easily, ducking his head, and Harry’s sure that he’s too far away. He creeps closer, nudging into some sort of conifer. “He sees something in that Malfoy boy that’s still –”

“I used to call him your name,” Sirius interrupts, as though he needs to confess it. Harry wishes that he would shut up. “Remus would rip me apart,” he says, and Harry hates how weak his voice sounds. “I was fucking – all over the place. It’s mortifying, looking back.” He sighs, and Harry hates whatever feeling it is that he feels. “But I never, Prongs – I never…”

“Padfoot, this is not a conversation,” James says solidly. His eyes are owlish, framed by glasses. “I am certain that my son was a very attractive boy. The Potter good looks,” he counts off arrogantly, “the Evans wit, the fervent chivalry. The interest in esoteric –”

“He only ever played quidditch,” corrects Sirius, shaking his head as though he finds this incomprehensible. “When he wasn’t –”

“He’s fifteen, we’ll forgive him,” James dismisses with a roll of his eyes. “The facts are these,” he moves on. “Even if I wouldn’t have castrated you with a big sharp knife from there beyond the veil, the pair of you are too similar and your eyes are turned in other ways. I don’t know where you go,” he carries on without a breath, “when Moony’s crying _murder_ at the world, but it’s about the same place our son goes when his darling dear Malfoy’s explaining that the laws of life and death are only for the little people.”

This observation startles Harry, the form of its sentence, and he blinks.

Frowning, Sirius comes to Harry’s defence, and he doesn’t deserve it. “You make him sound like –”

“Harry will only ever want to save this world,” says Harry’s dad shortly, as though any other suggestion is an insult. “But that’s the problem. He’d save all of us, no matter the cost.” He throws up his hands, frustrated. “I asked the lovely Hermione to describe it, the end, and she was comprehensive, as one would expect.”

Harry’s not sure what his dad means by this, because all he remembers from facing down Voldemort is the colour of his eyes and the trick with the wands. He’s mostly annoyed at the patronising description of Hermione as _lovely_ , which he knows would get her back up. The fact that it’s a description he uses himself – though not about Hermione, because she doesn’t like it – is neither here nor there.

“I worry about him being seduced,” his dad goes on, looking into the trees near Harry, but not directly at him. “By the promise of love, the promise of power… His desires are so clear to me – you remember the cellar,” he adds, and Harry startles, because they’ve been looking at his wards.

They must have done, Harry supposes, to break into Draco’s flat.

“I don’t know where he sees himself at the end of it,” concludes Harry’s dad, and this isn’t what he said to Harry’s mum. “All of us safe in that maze.”

“I’m glad that you can see _desire_ ,” says Sirius, horrifically, in passing. “He’s so inhibited, and that other one… I imagine them changing into jimjams and pining across the fifteen-inch gap.”

“Maybe don’t imagine it at all, you fucking letch,” suggests Harry’s dad, narrowing his eyes. It’s as though he doesn’t expect this insult to land. “This is my son we’re talking about.”

“Don’t you want your son to –”

Harry covers his ears for the end of this.

Whatever Sirius says, it makes his dad smirk, awfully, with murky eyes, but it gets no response. “ _Winter’s safety is the end of the year_ ,” says Harry’s dad, as though he’s been thinking about these words for a long time. They form a verse of Grimmo’s wards, tied into Harry’s cardinal point of the North.

“He’s not being _seduced_ , anyway,” mutters Sirius in the end, dragging the point back to something else, brushing greasy hair off his face. “That Malfoy boy thinks he’s the sun.”

“Because he’s dazzling and made of fire,” says Harry’s dad, as though this is obvious.

“You worry too much. He –” Sirius doesn’t finish this thought. His tone is dark, but he seems to have found a wave of energy from somewhere, looking fiercely into the woods where Harry’s standing.

“I worry exactly the right amount,” declares Harry’s dad, and Harry’s not sure what they’re talking about. They’re contradicting themselves, as far as he can tell.

“You’ll worry yourself into the ground,” says Sirius unironically. “The war ended, remember.”

“Did it, now?” comes the short reply.

Shutting his eyes, Harry swallows, thinking of water.

Quite abruptly, then, James breathes out, huffing as though bored as he tilts his head back, turning to sit straight on the bench and clapping his hands to his knees.

It makes Harry jump. “Padfoot,” he says, and Harry can’t tell if he’s being any more earnest than he has been till this point. “I can’t do this if you’re having a meltdown. I’m telling you that he’ll be home in the end, and this is when you tell me you agree.”

They’ve changed the subject to Lupin, and Harry feels relief –

– but it seems entirely misplaced. “I can’t focus on anything if you’re…” James begins before trailing off, clenching his jaw and looking frustrated, and Harry thinks that he might recognise his expression as distraught. He sounds more angry than upset.

Sirius tuts, lines drawing on his face as though James has said something unpleasant. “Don’t be daft, Prongs,” he says, facetious in a muted way, almost petulant. “I’m not having a meltdown; I’m incapable of melting. I’m stone-hard and pure, like a diamond.”

“I had such a row with him about it,” James goes on, ignoring this point. “About Snivellus fucking… Lily warned me – I should have remembered that it never helps anything. He’s out there somewhere,” he protests. “Fuzzy and alone and sheltering under a bridge…”

“He’ll be all right,” dismisses Sirius.

James looks at him, accusing. “It’s called the lunar _cycle_ for a reason.”

Sirius is short, resistant. “He’s less fragile than you think.” He’s working himself up. “He’s done it before. He did it for ten years; he did it on Saturday, the shirking cunt.”

Harry startles, and he hates himself for it.

“What happened the first time?” demands James, and Harry’s startled, yet again, curling in close to his tree. “That last summer,” James goes on. “81. How long was he gone?”

“Seven weeks,” Sirius tells him, apparently despite himself. He makes a sound of frustration, shifting on the bench and rubbing a hand over his mouth. Harry swallows, taking this is in, the tree a steady presence at his side. “Five-and-two long fucking weeks,” Sirius specifies. “Back for a month and then off again. No idea for how long that time.” He says this darkly, and Harry realises what part of 1981 they must be talking about. “He only said that he was needed for a fortnight.”

“And you don’t think that it was all of it wolves,” James presses, his expression earnest.

“He never told me that _any_ of it was.” Sirius shifts again, slouching more deeply into the bench and crossing his arms, shaking his head. He sighs. “It could have been, looking back,” he accepts, looking down at his arms. “A game of patience, he used to call it, that year.” He tuts again, irritated – and then alight in a bright rush of feeling. “And he was so fucking _young,_ ” he spits, showing teeth, and he’s not angry at Lupin.

A bird rushes through branches above Harry’s head, despite this. Harry ducks before he can stop himself.

James looks over his shoulder at the witch cleaning her rose-covered cottage. She doesn’t seem to be bothered by a word of what they’re saying, either entirely deaf or wearing headphones, Harry thinks, which would be absurd.

With a sigh, then, James leans forward, shifting on the bench to rest his elbows on his knees and rub his face, staring at the path and briefly at the sky. He looks – the way that he must have looked in 1981, Harry supposes, his heart breaking.

Sirius says nothing, his expression like lashing rain.

“You used to tell me,” James begins now, looking down. Sirius cringes, as though expecting to hear something embarrassing. “You’d tell me that one day, one of his _so-called_ missions was going to last forever.”

“What a bitch,” is Sirius’s immediate response, ironic, dark, and he looks exhausted again.

James laughs, and Harry feels another stab of something sad. “Changed your mind, then?” he asks lightly.

Sirius whines, tipping his head to his shoulder as though this is in fact a very weighty question indeed. “I think that if he’s coming home, he’s coming home,” he says eventually, as though he’s spent all weekend thinking this through. It’s much the same conclusion that Harry’s come to. “If he isn’t, then he isn’t.”

“Oh, come now,” James tells him archly, pushing.

“What would you have me say?” The words are defensive, but Sirius says them with no obvious emotion. Harry feels horrible, because this is everything he didn’t want. “The heart of me is shattered in a thousand bright splinters. But there’s nothing to be done about it. Maybe I didn’t pay him enough attention,” he suggests, looking at nothing. “Maybe he didn’t believe me. Maybe he never believed me. Maybe I could have stopped him, if I’d been paying a single shit-stained knut of attention.”

James sits up, watching him with a frown. Harry can guess what he’s thinking – all Sirius has ever done is pay attention to Lupin.

“Maybe –” Sirius finishes despite this, clear-eyed. “Maybe it was always going to be this way, and there’s nothing that I could have done about it.” Yet another shade of mocking humour glints from his face, serrated. He glances off up the hill, and his fingers move to scratch the back of his hand. “I’d rather this than what he did to get out of living with my _cousin._ ” He gives James a look.

“Ugh,” James responds with disgust, before Harry can make sense of what this means, his stomach turning over. _Living_ is a clue. “Too far,” complains James, at _last_.

“You always did have a weak constitution,” says Sirius fondly, unbothered, and Harry doesn’t understand it. It was James, wasn’t it? Sirius followed James. “I suppose that’s why you used to go off with the Prewetts.”

“ _Yes_ ,” James says, as though to have done anything else would have been ridiculous.

Harry swallows the lump in his throat. Far away he can hear the sound of London’s traffic, picking up with the day.

“And I like that George Weasley,” James says lightly in the cool morning light. It’s a distraction, Harry thinks, and it’s a welcome one. He sounds like he’s reporting in. “I don’t know why you never come to the pub with us. He reminds me of Gids,” he says. “Lily’s very fond of Angelina.”

Sirius seems happy to be distracted. “They are related,” he says, about George and his uncle.

“That was my point.”

There’s an oddness to this all its own, which Harry doesn’t know what to do with. He feels separate from the conversation again, down a tunnel into some other wonderland woods.

“Fred was nothing like Skids,” Sirius offers, and Harry looks down at the grass. “Bill’s the closest –”

“It sounds like he was much less of a cad,” James agrees.

“– which is why he and Moony get on. They’re both rogues, at the end of it.”

“Yes,” James accepts.

“Sometimes I think that I’ll only ever see shadows,” says Sirius wearily, entirely from nowhere.

There’s silence again, and it’s long.

"James, I don’t know what I’m doing," says Sirius suddenly, abruptly, the silence not hanging in wait this time as he scratches his hand, as a short sound like humour breaks out of him.

Harry’s toes curl, and he looks away, off down the hill towards the trees and the bushes and the grass and the graves.

“I have no idea where the fuck he could have gone, because I haven’t fucking known him since I was twenty years old and ignorant of very nearly everything.”

It’s clear, immediately, that nothing that Sirius has said up to this point has been in earnest, and Harry’s eyes sting, looking off into the morning sky.

James sighs, as though he’s been aware of this all along. “It’s not a crime,” he allows, though it still doesn’t sound as though he’s in charge. “He’s too proud of that life he lived without us. He won’t let anyone get out of him what it looked like.”

“No,” says Sirius simply, still nearly laughing, still scratching his hand. Harry can hear the lie in his voice, only absent for a second, and James should be picking up on it, he thinks. “He must have found it easy with Dora,” he carries on quickly, and he’s still _lying_. “He’ll have acted like he left school in 1989. Fudged out the gaps so his life looked like hers – only the first few years and then Hogwarts and the war.”

“Hmpf,” James doesn’t laugh, though he sounds more amused than not. “Yes, I can imagine it perfectly.”

Harry wants to tell him that Lupin never found it easy, as much as he remembers. He’s not sure that he ever saw him and Tonks happy together.

But then, Harry supposes, most of his friends could say the same about him and Draco.

James is still talking. His tone is much more cautious. “He’ll never have let on about you two.”

This sounds likely, now that Harry thinks about it.

Sirius nods too. “Just told her that he’d been around the block,” he suggests, and he isn’t saying that he knows this for a fact – but Harry thinks he can see it, in the way that he holds himself.

The air settles, vivid with tension. They’re both looking out into the cemetery. Harry looks at them, and for once outside his dreams he sees cousins, two brothers not of blood. He doesn’t know who he is, standing in these woods, watching one protect the other by not telling him the truth. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, only that he can’t look away.

James takes a deep breath, after a while. “It would bother me,” he says, exhaling, open, entirely nerve and daring. This is his own form of protection, Harry supposes: telling Sirius his concerns. Interfering. Setting himself up for rejection, for worse. Throwing himself into danger. It’s why he needs protecting, because it was always going to get him killed. “If I were you. It would.”

Sirius tries to dismiss him. “Says the man whose wife pretends –”

“There are rings on our fingers,” James counters, solid. He jokes, “Bells on our toes.”

This earns him a huff of frustration, and Harry knows how Sirius feels. “Well, you’re not me,” he concludes, ironic, looking at James with an odd expression on his face, raised eyebrows. Harry can’t read it. A smile pulls at his mouth, something almost a laugh. Harry doesn’t know if he wants to be able to read it. “I couldn’t give a fuck,” he says, the word coming out of him as easily as it comes out of Malfoy. “What is it to me, the bollocks Remus tells other people?”

Often Harry thinks that Sirius and Malfoy are the only ones who are similar.

“I could not give a fuck,” says Sirius again, thumping a knee as though shoring himself up, looking at his very best friend. It’s possible that he is being entirely honest, even if he’s not revealing the full of what he’s talking about. “You weren’t there, when it was him and me and _Peter_ in the Shack, the first time since…”

It’s something sad, Harry realises, caught between Sirius’ eyes as he shakes his head and breathes. Something terribly sad which Harry’s ashamed to be seeing, and yet he can’t look away from it.

“Most things in this life are nothing but noise,” says Sirius after a moment, insistent. James is watching him, so carefully, looking for answers. “Other things, when you hear them, it’s –” He frowns and sucks in breath, Sirius, looking at nothing, down the hill, breathing in and breathing out. “The rest doesn’t matter.” The last thing he says takes Harry entirely by surprise. “I think that I would do this every year until the very end of things.” His elbows are on his knees and he presses the heels of his palms to his forehead, breathing in, hitting himself before he looks up.

“I’m not sure that this is good for you, Sirius,” James says lightly, fond, refusing to let Sirius give too much of himself away. He raises his eyebrows, immediately moving on. “For a start, you’ve clearly outgrown me,” he accuses.

Like the crackle of twigs breaking, Sirius laughs, and Harry blinks, his face changes so quickly. “Impossible,” Sirius insists with an exaggerated frown, all his feelings vanished away even as his breathing remains laboured.

“And I never thought that you two were forever,” James says easily, and Sirius rears back as though offended. Somehow, they’re returned to a pantomime, and Harry feels sad. “We were always going to be friends,” James continues emphatically. “But you’ve never stuck with anything in your life…”

This is all ironic, completely, and Harry can’t tell what’s really meant. _Dogged_ is a word that was made to describe Sirius Black.

“Prongs,” insists Sirius, grinning. “I told Moony that I was in _love_.”

“You don’t believe in _love_ ,” James scoffs – 

And it’s weird, how brightly Sirius laughs. “You’ve got the voice wrong,” he says.

“My apologies,” James replies. He changes his tone, and suddenly he sounds uncannily like Sirius, his tone deep and scuffed at the edges. “ _I’ll fuck anything, Prongs; you know me. Moony seemed up for it; I was drunk._ Oh right,” he continues in his own voice, younger somehow, emphatically plucky and sincere. “How did that work? I didn’t even know that Moony was… _Oh,_ ” he says as Sirius again, frowning, pulling his mouth into a smirk. “ _How’d you miss that one? Pfft, doesn’t matter; wasn’t difficult. I felt him up and told him that I was in love with him. Complete fucking joke, right? Good line._ ”

Harry doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or cry.

Sirius is cringing, all of him hunched as though he has finally realised that, once upon a time, he was a cock. He’s pulled his knee to his chest again. He takes up the joke anyway, plainly lying. “The fact is that I don’t feel anything,” he says.

“Here we go,” James accepts, looking off into Harry’s trees and looking highly amused.

“Other people are inordinately boring, and _girls_ …” Sirius scoffs archly, almost making Harry laugh. “It’s a good thing for you, because it’s obvious that Lily –“

“I think that there’s only one Potter you care about,” James throws back, propping his elbows on the back of the bench either side of him and generally spreading himself out, wearing only a sweaty yellow t-shirt and too short scarlet-red shorts. Because he’s nothing but an advert for Gryffindor House.

For a long time, Sirius looks at him, and he seems to be applying all of his willpower not to laugh.

This must be an absolutely ancient joke, Harry thinks. It’s the same one from yesterday.

James is the one who cracks first. Even as Sirius’s shoulders start to shake, James’ grin breaks out into a wicked peal of laughter, loud enough to disturb another couple of birds.

“You’re a fucking embarrassment,” Sirius tells him, shaking his head and grinning broadly.

Harry thinks that it’s likely time to leave. “Chin up, dog,” James instructs, maybe seriously.

Eyes narrow, Sirius glares. “Don’t call me that,” he says, without any humour at all.

James looks at him with the smallest smile on his face. “All right, Padfoot, I won’t,” he agrees. “But you’re due a bathe and a brush and a sleep. I’ve had thoughts,” he says, commanding, pointing a finger and sitting up straight. “And there’s more where they’ve come from. You’re on for that interview tomorrow, for a start.” It’s as though they’re playing quidditch. “I need you alert. Bluff with rainbow pride, if you can stomach it.”

“I wear one colour, James,” says Sirius, resisting, sitting over his knees as though he knows that this adventure is over.

“Yes, yes, and it’s not a colour at all –”

It’ll be suspicious, if they come back to Grimmo and Harry’s not there, so he moves to disapparate. _Evanesco,_ he risks thinking, pointing his wand at the beetle in James’s hair and then ducking behind the tree to escape.

He risks a glance back – James is scratching at his scalp, carding fingers, but finds nothing. “You know what it’s for,” he’s telling Sirius.

“He’s a ten-year head start,” Sirius is going on about Lupin, wearing black and very much in need of a bath. “I don’t know what you imagine –“

“I don’t imagine. I act.” The words come out of James as though with long practice. He’s instructing himself, Harry thinks. “ _Imagining_ when doing could be done is the quintessence of wasting time.”

Rolling eyes. “Goody, goody, rah, rah, hooray,” is the last that Harry hears from Sirius, droll.

* * *

Malfoy’s awake when Harry gets back, which is both unexpected and awkward.

“What are you doing with that cloak?” he asks blearily, sitting up in bed because Harry forgot to apparate somewhere else.

“Oh, you’re talking to me now?” Harry throws at him, shuffling the thing off quickly and putting it away with his map inside the wardrobe’s leather backpack. He’s good at distraction. “You should be asleep; you weren’t in till two,” he takes a guess.

“You left,” Malfoy says, but the distraction hasn’t worked. When Harry stands up he’s being watched, and as he shuts the wardrobe door.

There in the bed, Malfoy’s sitting up over his knees, under the duvet. His posture reminds Harry of Sirius, but he’s not laughing or sneering, just staring. He’s wearing a rumpled black t-shirt, like Sirius, but clothes aren’t clothes when Malfoy wears them, because Harry only sees what’s underneath.

In a great sea of grey, the white behind him, rumpled and worn, Malfoy looks like a pit of gravity. He looks nearly broken; he looks powerful, his gaze sweeping down from Harry’s face to the rest of him in assessment. He looks like he’s survived something awful with the unicorn core of him intact, and it’ll be the bright white-gold of his hair.

Harry feels like he’s gone somewhere else in time, as though he’s in the wrong place, or that he was before. It’s disorientating, using the cloak. He shouldn’t have done it.

He remembers that he can speak. “Draco,” he says, as a prompt. He doesn’t want to be seduced; he wants to love him.

Meeting Harry’s eyes, Draco’s are rimmed red, Harry notices. His hair is greasy; his skin is pale and dry. He can’t have got in until four or five, and –

“I don’t believe that it’s the veil,” he’s saying, as though he needs to say it, as though it’s difficult to say, the words uncertain shapes in his throat. His expression is fathomless, and his eyes drop to look somewhere that’s nowhere. “It hasn’t taken him back.”

He’s talking about Lupin. He’s talking about what he’s been doing, for thirty-six hours, because his thoughts must have spiralled until he was –

His dad might not trust Draco, Harry thinks, but that’s because his dad doesn’t _know_.

A great, huge wave of feeling washes over Harry from his heart to his fingers and throat. Surprise is the edge of it, but the rest of it burns white to see the earnest, hopeless feeling there in Draco’s eyes. He finds himself climbing up and back into the bed, under the duvet, his jeans old and smelly and inconvenient.

“Of course it’s not that,” he’s saying, not thinking about anything else, unbuttoning and kicking himself free, of his trainers. He takes hold of the body in the bed wherever he can, and it’s everywhere too cold, Draco’s elbows and his jaw and his chest underneath his t-shirt, which feels hollow, breathing. “It’s not true. What have you –? Have you been _worried?_ ”

Swallowing, Draco looks tearful, and Harry thinks that he should have been there, whenever this hit, and he finds himself compulsively working fingers through Draco’s own greasy hair, pulling him close. He looks unwell; he feels unwell; Harry doesn’t know how to keep him from falling apart.

He was supposed to have gone into work because he couldn’t look at Harry. That what was what he said. “ _Fuck Lupin_ , you said,” Harry reminds him, pulling off his pointless t-shirt to hold him closer. “You’re not responsible…”

“I’ve been through everything that I can think of,” Draco promises, entirely gone, his voice thick and his eyes unseeing as Harry sits back to throw his glasses to the nightstand and wrench his own t-shirt over his head. “There’s nothing to suggest… My canary –”

Harry’s heard a lot about this canary. It’s an irrelevant thought, but – “You need to give that thing a name if you’re keeping it.”

“I wrote everything down, so that Vespers…” Harry’s Draco can’t keep a thought in his head, frowning, swallowing. “But she’s not there. It’s the weekend. I think she’s in maybe… Belgrade? I don’t know –”

“Stop thinking,” Harry tells him, taking in his fissuring expression, squeezing his shoulders, rubbing his arms. He can’t bear the thought that they’ve come back to this. “Lie down.”

Harry hears his voice sound almost like it does up at school, when it needs to. He doesn’t dwell on it. He lies down first, shuffling Draco down with him then rolling to smother the thoughts out of him, all the cold, kissing Draco’s cheek near his nose, burrowing to kiss his pulse. A hand receives his head, much too weak.

Draco has always smelled like something earthy and spicy and sweet, maybe ginger or something else that would go with a cup of tea. He belongs somewhere rooted, not lost and adrift. He doesn’t believe in wizarding supremacy, Harry’s sure of it, if he even ever did. He believes in the power of magic to save them, and Harry wants to believe in that too.

“Sleep,” Harry tells the smell of him, finding collarbone. “It’s not late.” He plants his mouth on the ridge. “You can wake up for lunch. It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right.” Draco’s voice cracks. “Your wolf is missing and I–“

Harry kisses up his jaw, all over him, seducing him because he knows exactly how. Draco doesn’t pull away, kissing him back, breathing harshly, and it takes a worryingly long time for the effort to exhaust him, the good feeling to relax him. Harry worries, lying on top of him, feeling breath draw in and out over his cheek, the odd shiver. He worries and he feels a burning feeling, like anger, like something needs to be done.

For the moment, he doesn’t move, shutting his eyes to Draco’s hair and the pillow, smelling ginger, because what needs to be done is this.

His phoenix wand’s in his hand, Harry realises when Draco wakes him up for lunch, hours later, curled up behind him in the end. He must have never put it away.


	10. Another world, part 4

In the end, Harry forces himself to read the correspondence. It takes him entirely out of himself; he feels like he’s somewhere not in a shed, not in the present, maybe in a dream.

The letters haven’t been kept in any order, so they take a while to sort through. The early letters have dates at the top, and they’re significant – birthdays and OWLs and Christmases. There don't seem to be any from the eighties. In the nineties, Harry guesses, dates start disappearing, but the flow of events is there when he looks for it.

Sirius’s letters are nearly all written on the back of notes from Lupin. Most of their conversation during Harry’s fourth school year seems to be about nothing, which makes Harry think of the blank parchment. He’s only skimming; his eyes keep falling on _Kurt Cobain_ , which he takes to be nothing but early-nineties colour – until he catches on that it’s weird, because they’re debating whether Courtney hired a hitman and if Kurt’s really dead.

It seems odd for them to dwell on conspiracies so soon after Sirius; eventually Harry susses out that it’s a code about Voldemort, and he feels very thick.

In the end, Harry gets back to the beginning, and he has to sit on his shaking hand as he allows what he’s looking at to sink in.

> _S –_
> 
> _I don’t know whether you’ll receive this letter. I feel foolish writing it, and it will be beyond foolish to send it, but as my stories tend to begin, I met a dodgy man in the pub._
> 
> _Which is to say that the owner of this owl won’t ask questions – or else that if you receive this, he hasn’t done. I’ll have to hope that you can make out how to read it; our desiderata for the Map kept me going until 1985._
> 
> _I’m in the low countries. That is as much as I am comfortable saying. You may be able to deduce a little more. I’ve found a job rather too quickly and they were happy to let me start it. They were impressed by my referee, I think. It’s only maternity cover, but the pay will cover my expenses and then some, and I’m only rarely needed on site._
> 
> _As usual, I bring you excuses._
> 
> _Let me apologise, before I bring you more. I am sorry – for all of it, for that night. I am desolate, frankly. I lie awake, agonising over how I can convince you. I believe that I apologised for some of it at the time, but do not trust my recall of events. I must say it again, because I roundly buggered things up, you’ll agree. The letters I’ve drafted to ----- and the others – I’ve burned every one of them. I am utterly ashamed._
> 
> _Please reply, if you can, if only with mud. A big cross on the back of this to let me know that you’re alive and to tell me bugger off._

It’s possible that the letter was supposed to end here. It doesn’t.

> _I do not know where you could be now. This must be for the best. I wanted to send you something, but did not know what. A quill or ink or parchment would be much too conspicuous. In the end I’ve enclosed you a crossword, which I’m sure that you can do in your head. It’s from Le Sabbat, but I’m equally sure that this won’t be a problem._
> 
> _There is a great deal I want to tell you. I imagine our paths crossing by chance, now that this is possible, and I imagine talking to you through the night until the morning._
> 
> _Thirteen years is a long time, and you must be terribly angry with me. But I’ve committed so many sins, S, and you were always the one to whom I confessed them. I find myself reluctant to stop._
> 
> _It’s late, I should say, and I’ve drunk far too much wine. You would be laughing at me._
> 
> _I never loved ----- as well as I loved you. There, I’ve written it._
> 
> _And, yes, obviously – I can imagine your face – but I don’t mean it like that._
> 
> _Because it should not be difficult to write, but it is. For so long I have lived in the world of his creation, where the opposite had to be true. I am disciplined to the thought of it. The news gutted me at the time, and the wound would never heal before the memory split me open again. After thirteen years I am not sure what’s left of my insides. Your love for J was the one thing I believed in, by the time it was over._
> 
> _If I see him again I will kill him, mercy and kindness be damned. He took everything. He took ---- and ----- and he took you, needless to write._
> 
> _I am sorry, dog. Merlin, am I sorry._

The letter isn’t signed, but there’s a paw print on the back of it, in ink. It’s a mess. Above it there’s text, equally blotchy.

> _M, stop apologising, you tease. Here I am with BB, who sends love, and all is well._
> 
> _You may not know BB, but he is my new master and saviour. He’s responsible for the spiffy homemade quill I’m using, though I hang my head as I tell you that I did nick the ink…_
> 
> _I should take your points in order. But these dodgy men in pubs – who are they? If I start here I’m not sure I’ll ever end. Your stories used to begin, “While you were fucking around with that jalopy bike…” Maybe you were always meeting dodgy men in pubs, but you ever declined to tell me. I am hurt._
> 
> _I pause. I regroup. Behold, I am serene – ! There is nothing to forgive, M. We are both as we always were: much beyond saving and much beyond fault. I linger on your penultimate paragraph, because I could rather kill him for any of it and that doesn’t make me feel badly at all. So who’s looking worse, at the end of things?_
> 
> _I tell you, stop fretting. How do we live without J and L, if not by the drudging purpose of postlapsarian duty? Making you ill is the taste of the air without their breath, and the rest is ornamental detail._
> 
> _A different topic: your new job, plus ça change. Let me see if I can remember my lines… You are not being overpaid, he says forthrightly, because there is no such thing. They offer; you take. You are not allowed to resign, nor contemplate resigning. Milk them like a dairy cow, and if they sack you, they sack you._
> 
> _Wasn’t that fun? I had fun. I would have more fun if you told me what you’ll really do, when our paths cross again. Talking? M, please. I am very bored out here in the wilderness…_
> 
> _No? All right. I’ll settle for the stimulation of this crossword, which expects rather much of me, I think._
> 
> _Yes, he writes, having looked at it – why? I charge you again, because it is a tease. Why have you sent this? I am rolling over and gasping; it’s too much. Have you not been told? I am a stultified husk of blood and piss and hunger and the smell of my own sweat. I’ve no mind left for anything as frivolous as foreign words._
> 
> _You’ll have to send me another letter, I think, with a few more confessions. That way I can send the thing back to you, and you can check the answers, yes?_
> 
> _Yours ever faithful,_

And here there’s the paw print. There’s a postscript.

> _One last command: WRITE TO ----- Cease disposing of drafts in the fire; it’s a waste of good parchment, as you would tell me._

Harry reads this postscript several times.

* * *

As far as Harry can tell, his dad would like to live a life in which he’s never alone and never has to sit still.

What he’s ended up with, in 2008, is a version of this that’s slightly underpowered. It’s structured around fixed points. In the morning, Harry’s dad goes for a run, and he follows this with breakfast. If he’s the only one around (besides Harry) he wakes up Sirius – never Harry’s mum – and on good mornings breakfast takes until ten. On bad mornings, he’s told to fuck off, at which point he finds someone on the floo for a chat until Harry’s mum comes downstairs, passing through the floo sometimes instead.

At lunchtime, he talks to Harry’s mum about what she’s been up to that morning. Being a celebrity seems to have become her full-time occupation, so there’s always plenty of news, and she seems to appreciate Harry’s dad’s suggestions, weirdly enough.

Tea time is when he pulls out the stops, because there’s usually an audience of at least three or four.

It’s a bit sad.

Around these fixed points, the rest of Harry’s dad’s day is filled with various things, mostly inconsequential. If he’s doing anything to investigate Lupin’s disappearance, then Harry can’t work out what it is – which is odd, Harry thinks, because he sounded so adamant in the cemetery.

He may only have been talking about the Lily-and-James-Potter-want-social-tolerance campaign, which Harry avoids, though Hermione seems to approve.

“What we need is for them to interrogate their _terms_ ,” is the sort of thing that she’ll say over dinner, fired up like Harry hasn’t seen her in years. “Take us beyond this zero-sum game…”

“What’s a zero-sum game?” Harry finds himself asking Ron while the others carry on. Draco never says much, but he’s always listening, which is distractingly attractive. Harry’s hand ends up on his knee.

“It’s something about only winning when the other side lose,” Ron explains. “Playing for the match instead of the league, I think’s the idea.”

“Bit confusing,” Harry decides, not sure what this means.

“Who doesn’t play for the league?” Ron agrees, which gets them started on transfers.

The aurors are doing things about Lupin, though they’ve not got anywhere yet. Everyone’s had a chat with Katie Bell, who’s taken it up because Ron’s officially too close. They keep an owl in Grimmo and Harry’s mum’s bought another, who’s gone for a long time but returns with her letter unopened.

Sometimes Harry’s dad digs out Sirius’s teenage tinkering projects, his TV and remote-controlled car – but only if there’s someone to annoy with them. He spends a lot of time listening to sport – but only if he’s doing something else, or he’s bothering Harry’s mum in the library. He’s applied to several amateur quidditch clubs, but none of them are holding try-outs before September.

He needs a job, Harry thinks.

As it is, his dad steals Kreacher’s work instead, finding tasks to do around the house. This is the reason, Harry supposes, that four and now three new occupants haven’t made much difference to the state of things, why the garden’s looking so nice and why Kreacher seems to have been focusing on food.

There’s a new motorbike in the breakfast room, which Sirius likes to swear at after lunch, insisting that he will make it fly and swim and go invisible, and he doesn’t want anyone to bother him, so fuck off, Prongs, find something to do.

Harry gets the impression that his dad prefers to be outside, rather than in. But he also gets the impression – marking up textbooks, sketching over lesson plans, sneaking downstairs in his cloak, sneaking to the shed to read letters – that his dad doesn’t like to leave Sirius in the house on his own when he’s in a bad mood, which is probably right

(“Harry,” Draco’s been saying. “ _Harry_ ,” he repeats until Harry looks at him. “Where have you been and why are you invisible?” He’s not very good at pushing things, so he only says, “Hmm,” when Harry shrugs, trying to find words to ask if he knows the way back to reality.

He needs to fix this, Harry reminds himself. Reality is less important.).

Around six o’clock every evening, Sirius takes out the bike until late, when Harry hears him come in because he can’t get to sleep and the windows are open behind Draco’s curtains. When he leaves, Sirius hovers the bike up and through the front door, down the steps, and then he drives off into the sun, disturbing the birds in the garden square. Sometimes he tells Harry’s dad that he’ll take care.

At this point, with a sigh, Harry’s dad goes to the pub.

“Who are we expecting?” he asks one evening, finding George, plonking down his pint of ale on the table.

“Angelina’s up in York,” George says, already an inch through his beer with a notebook of ideas out in front of him, which he quickly tidies away. “Ron and the missus should be in,” he adds, smirking, and Harry can imagine Ron’s gulp. “I s’pose the babby’s working?” he says, meaning Harry, borrowing a word from Harry’s mum.

“All day and all night, it seems like,” James replies, leaning into the Leaky’s plum and gold upholstery. There’s a window behind them, misted up and always smoked glass. The pub’s quiet; it’s early in the week. “Him and that Malfoy. Workaholics, the pair of them.”

George accepts this, nodding his head as though he thinks that it’s true. Harry’s not sure why. He’s less easy to read than Ron, George, and he’s been quieter ever since Fred, as though he’s forever thinking of jokes instead of making them. His hair’s thicker than Ron’s and much curlier. “No Lily?” he asks last, and it’s strange.

“Ah, no,” James tells him, taking a swallow of his beer. “She’s got something on.”

“Oh, right. What’s that?”

Even now, Harry can’t make sense of his father’s expressions. James seems almost guarded this evening, looking at George, and that doesn’t seem right at all. “It’s part of the likely doomed initiative to lumber Harry with a sibling,” he admits, and Harry supposes that this is because he counts George as a friend.

Harry’s still not been told directly about this plan, presumably in case he kicks off. As it is, from his investigating, he’s fairly immune to it as a topic of conversation.

“There’s a way around things for people like us,” James goes on, explaining. “It was yet to exist in our day, as far as we know, or was being developed. Lily’s gone to hear more about it.”

“Hm,” George replies, sitting back and frowning. It sounds as though he’s interested. “That up at Mungo’s? There’s nothing I’ve heard…”

“They don’t do obstetrics at Mungo’s,” James points out, a passing remark.

“Oh yeah,” George remembers.

It’ll be at Hedwig’s, round the corner, Harry thinks. St Hedwig’s Hospital for Magical Mothers and Children. He took Teddy there once when they thought that he’d caught spattergroit from Victoire. He likes the name.

“But in any case,” James goes on, almost awkwardly, making Harry reconsider the man’s blasé attitude. James is holding his beer, fingers wet with condensation. “It’s not…” He seems to make a decision. “It’s a, ah, muggle treatment,” he succeeds in telling George. “Lily heard about it from her hairdresser.”

“Really?” George asks now, looking amused. He sounds disbelieving. Harry’s surprised too. “Not one of those things where they send you to sleep and cut you open with a knife…”

James rolls his eyes, and he looks awkward, Harry thinks. The conversation is entirely surreal, but he doesn’t let that get to him. He wonders if James is reading the cue to shut up, make a joke. “It won’t be me who’ll be getting cut up,” he says, and that’s a clue for George, Harry thinks, the certain way that he says it. Though Harry’s not sure why there’d be cutting involved in what he’s talking about. “Lily’s said that I might like to keep my understanding vague,” he concedes, though he won’t when it comes to it, Harry’s sure.

Here in the Leaky, Harry’s watching from an empty table, just one over because the pub’s quiet. He tenses when George doesn’t seem to catch the clue, making a face. “Not sure I like the thought of that. I mean, is it safe for us to –“ He means, is it safe for witches and wizards.

“There’s no difference, is there?” James interrupts. He looks awkward, and Harry doesn’t know why. He’s used to James Potter looking proud. It doesn’t seem to keep him from making his point. “It’s not as though you open us up and a bunch of carnations pops out.”

“Well, no,” George replies, looking oddly as though he wouldn’t be surprised. “I’m just not sure that I could –”

“It’s something that Lily and I are looking into,” James finishes, closing down the conversation. He doesn’t seem proud; he seems tired. “Hermione’s chased it all up –”

Harry’s not sure that George is thinking about anything he’s saying. He doesn’t go into the muggle world much, Harry knows. He’s never come out drinking. After Fred, he put his head down and he put all of his efforts into the shop. Wheezes never did expand to Hogsmeade, but Zonko’s sells some of their products, and George does the same back. He’s busy, every day.

Right now, George is allowing, “Yeah, all right, _Hermione_ –”

And Harry’s dad says shortly, impatient, “Hermione what?”

Harry draws his wand, even though he knows that George doesn’t mean it that way.

It’s quarter-past-six in the pub, and George looks Harry’s dad in the eye. They both look like Gryffindors, Harry thinks; he can imagine them young and in school. They don’t look much like Harry and Ron. Ron’s a Gryffindor at work, Harry thinks, while he himself tries to be neutral. At Grimmo, Harry likes to think of each one of them as Hufflepuffs, their swords all hung up and Justin Finch-Fletchley taking their place. Doing it right.

He also doesn’t like to think this. It’s confusing.

“I don’t like what you’re implying that I’m saying,” George says straightforwardly, his jaw set.

“I don’t like that you’re saying what you’re saying,” replies Harry’s dad, smoothly, not tired anymore but not fighting, maybe. “There’s no call for it.”

“I’m not saying anything,” says George, his eyes narrow.

“Then that’s settled,” agrees Harry’s dad with a broad and insincere grin, sitting back.

They nurse their pints in moody silence after this. Harry watches, on edge.

And yet in the space of five minutes they seem to have forgiven each other. “It’s a shame about Harry,” George begins again, as though the argument is nothing to remember. The sound of his own name makes Harry start. “Mum’s worried about him. He’s been avoiding her; she’s got herself in a right tizz.”

Harry pauses. It’s true that he hasn’t seen Molly since the wedding, but he didn’t think –

“I don’t even remember how it started,” George goes on. “I was so wasted.” He grins.

“Ah, well,” says Harry’s dad, looking slightly sheepish, but also making a face as though to say, _What can you do?_ “We were all rather poorly behaved.”

George nods, drinking his pint, as though this is true. “We can’t persuade Mum that it wasn’t over Ginny. We keep telling her, he doesn’t need a _girlfriend_ , but she’s not worked it out. I mean –” He seems to tread carefully, which is weird. “It’s hard to know what Harry sees in him, but you say he’s all right…”

Harry’s dad nods, swallowing. “We all like him –”

George scoffs. “That’s what Ronnie says –”

“It’s true,” says Harry’s dad evenly, and this isn’t what he said to Sirius. “It’s unnerving when he looks directly at you, but he’s nothing like the person you describe and he’s nothing like his father.” He goes on, and it might be the beer; George is listening, bemused. “He reminds me of Sirius’s brother, the more I get to know him,” he admits. “Though don’t tell either of them that I said that. And Regulus would never have been caught sounding like a _vulgarian_ …”

James is doing an impression with this word, his tone turning arch and effete, his head lolling with a sigh – but then he cringes as though he regrets bringing up Regulus, and Harry decides not to dwell on it.

“How is the bride with it all?” he changes the subject, shaking his head, drinking his pint.

Dismissively, George waves a hand. “Oh, Gin’s fine; she doesn’t care. Worried that the thing was going to be _boring_ by the end, apparently.” He tuts. “As if I didn’t tell her… Don’t tell Mum,” he interrupts himself, leaning forward, and they’re both of them awful, “but it’s blatant that she regrets letting someone else do the cake.” He finishes with a look. “Led astray by her celebrity mates, if you ask me.”

“Mm,” acknowledges James, drinking.

“She told Mum that she wanted to protect her from _scrutiny_ ,” George goes on, sarcastic, making a face though this is ridiculous. “It was always going to end up in magazines,” he allows. “But that’s no _reason_ , is it?”

Ridiculously, James leans into the gossip, putting down his pint. Harry cannot _believe_ that this is why they get on. “But when it comes to _Harry_ ,” he says, and Harry wishes that he wouldn’t.

“Stop worrying about it,” George suggests, sitting back. “She’s been trying to make him kick off for years.” He jokes, “Drives her mental, watching him act like some gormless prat’s drunk his Polyjuice.”

“He’s never like that at home,” insists James. “That speech –”

“What _was_ that? Exactly,” George seems to agree, looking annoyed, his hair thicker and redder than Ron’s and his scowl more intense. He lifts his pint, and Harry feels terrible. “Never define us?” he quotes after swallowing. “My brother is dead! But I told you,” he goes on, as though this wound is old and familiar, and Harry feels worse, “she says she went off him the first time that she saw him throw up in a drain.”

James wrinkles his nose, and Harry feels mortified –

“I know,” George seems to agree with something that James hasn’t said. He grins, as though this is funny. “I don’t believe it either.”

“Ah, now, I never said _that_ ,” James says, picking up his pint again.

“I’m just glad that she made a decision,” George tells him, very open. James studiously doesn’t reply. “She’s never known what she wants. Either that, or she can’t admit when she’s lost.”

This doesn’t seem particularly fair, to Harry.

“I’ve told her,” George goes on, sounding amused. James is drinking. “Not that it matters now, but she could’ve stuck with any of the blokes she’s chucked over the years. Harry’s a dead end; he’s always been a dead end. It’s not his fault; he’s gay,” George states, as though this is entirely inconsequential. “There’s no way to win.”

The sentiment makes Harry startle, nonetheless. He has to pull his hood down where he’s sitting invisible, the front of the cloak wrapped around his hand. He doesn’t think that what George is saying is true. He doesn’t know. He’s never fancied that many people.

He can’t believe that George is talking about this with his _dad_.

Dwelling on this point, Harry doesn’t keep up as the conversation continues, circling around the wedding and the fact that one of the first things Harry’s dad remembers from after coming back is last season’s Puds U match against Appleby, when Ginny scored a century.

“Well, Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes feels _snubbed,_ ” George concludes, nose in the air. It brings Harry back to things, because it makes him think of Ron and Hermione’s wedding. “Our Screaming Streamers have won an award.”

James is laughing, putting down his pint. “No one cares about the fucking award, Sneezy,” he mocks, and Harry cannot believe that he gets away with making jokes about the Weasley brothers as the seven dwarves. Or gnomes, as they are in Beedle the Bard.

Promptly, George even pretends to be tromping through undergrowth, pumping arms, a heavy frown on his face as though he’s about to throw a gnomish tantrum. James sniggers, and when the joke’s done George changes tack.

He sighs, dropping an elbow to the table. “Charlie thinks that we should pull out the mandrake and tell Mum about Harry and the blond one,” he says wryly. “He thinks that she’ll find it suitably epic. She got over Audrey,” he seems to make Charlie’s argument with a very pointed look.

And Harry finds this confusing, because he’s always thought that Molly and Audrey got on like a house on fire.

“Yes,” says James, as though he knows this story better than Harry does. “But Auds and Percy came as a set, didn’t they?” he goes on familiarly. It’s true that Percy and Audrey got together before the end of the war, when Percy was still with the Ministry. “I told you I discovered her?” Harry’s dad interrupts his own point. “She was exceptional. Rather odd and not much of a team player, but that’s seekers all over. She’s a dark horse, I promise you…”

Thinking hard to keep up, Harry supposes this must mean that Audrey played seeker for Gryffindor when James was captain. This would make her several years older than Harry thought.

The age difference could have been a problem for Molly, Harry supposes. It seems a bit daft; Percy and Audrey have three children these days and are clearly very happy together, being pernickety. Audrey makes excellent cake.

“But what does Bill have to say about it?” James distracts himself to the present. “We haven’t had Bill,” he insists mock-earnestly, and he’s joking somehow.

Scoffing, George doesn’t sound impressed by what he reports. “He thinks that Ginny’s happy and in love, everyone’s happy and in love, and the only reason that any of us have ever complained is because we want a front-row seat on the _drama._ ”

Harry can hear it in his head, and it almost makes him laugh. He’s always liked Bill.

George finishes reporting, sounding put-out, “ _He’s_ the only one with a right of revenge against _our_ Malfoy, and he’d rather find out how he fixed the vanishing cabinet…”

And Harry’s dad _is_ laughing. Harry doesn’t know what he feels, warm and hopeful. “Mm…” says James, pulling in the foam from his lip.

“Dad agrees with him,” George finally relents, and that’s always the end of it. “He reckons that Harry should tell Mum himself,” he adds seriously, making Harry’s stomach invert.

“He’s very wise, Arthur,” agrees Harry’s own dad.

George’s ear and his ear hole twitches as he grins. “All right, old man,” he says cuttingly. 

With a sound of complaint, Harry’s dad makes George laugh, and the world turns somehow. Everything settles into a pattern where it feels inevitable that George and Harry’s dad would be drinking friends.

Under the cloak, Harry wants to ask what else Arthur has said, because he didn’t know that he knew – but he can’t, not without giving himself away and ruining the whole evening.

Hermione arrives not long after this, looking harried and in her own world, breaking up the conversation by immediately launching into a long explanation of something she’s read and is clearly thinking through. Harry’s never thought to question whether the things that Hermione rattles on about are wizarding or muggle, at any particular time – and nor has he ever much considered that someone might find it rude, as George’s weary expression seems to imply (“Hello Hermione,” he says sarcastically. “How are you?”). Harry’ll need to run interference on the decorations, he supposes. That’s fine.

Ron and Katie Bell and a bloke from Percy’s year, maybe, turn up later. Harry slopes off back to Grimmo because the pub is filling up and he can’t hear his dad speak, no matter how much his voice carries.

* * *

> _My dear Remus,_
> 
> _I hope that Igraine and the rest of the team at the SCARABÉE are treating you well. I write in response to your letter dated the first of July. The issue you raise is a delicate matter, and I hope you will believe that I am sincere when I tell you that I have worried over it at length._
> 
> _You know as well as I that the future is uncertain, much as it has always been. We cannot know where and when our talents will find themselves of most use. Who would have thought that you would find yourself in Belgium?_
> 
> _I am so very proud of you, Remus: you have come so far from that boy I met in –_

There’s a hole in the parchment here, scored out and through and messing up the rest of the paragraph.

> _I believe that Professor Remus John Lupin, one time of Hogwarts, is exactly the wizard you were destined to become. Of course you might be in touch once, even twice, with an old friend, after hearing a rumour of his innocence; I too have heard that strange story from the devil’s snare. But it was all a long time ago, was it not? Minerva tells me that she cannot recall your presence at the Potters’ wedding, though I am certain that you remember them fondly, as do we all._
> 
> _Look forward, Remus. We will be thinking of you, here at Hogwarts. Do let us keep in touch._
> 
> _Yours ever,_
> 
> _APWBD_
> 
> _PS. You think far too much of an old man’s reputation! Your experience makes you eminently qualified for this position, do not doubt it!_

* * *

There’s a piece of parchment which has been ripped in half, as though the top of it couldn’t be kept. A drawn line runs into the tear, as though it was once attached to an arrow or angry circles of ink around whatever’s missing.

> _Yes, you could do this, M, or you could find a better way to keep our correspondence secure, because I won’t be leaving you alone._
> 
> _How dare you? Not allowed to be in love with me? You never were to begin with, according to you. I don’t know why you write these things that you refuse to tell me to my face._
> 
> _I won’t mention you to -----, fine. But I won’t be telling you anything either. You can see how it feels._
> 
> _I am very cross with you, and BB is too. Here is a drawing._

On the back of the parchment is a finely detailed drawing of an eagle’s scowling face, obsessive feeling and thought in every angry stroke.

From what Harry can tell, Lupin lasts about a month. It’s good going, Harry thinks. He used to call it good going if he lasted a month.

* * *

> _Dear Professor Lupin,_
> 
> _I hope that you do not mind me writing to you. I have asked my parents, and they have said that they are happy for me to do so. I completely understand if you do not feel comfortable replying, especially now that you do not teach us anymore._
> 
> _You may have read in the news that Harry has been selected to take part in the Triwizard Tournament. I am terribly worried about him, and this is not entirely relevant, but he has fallen out with Ron over it, and I rather think that this is taking up his attention more than the upcoming task, about which he knows nothing. This is the reason for my letter._
> 
> _I was interested to know if you might have any advice for him, or the names of any good textbooks that he might use to prepare himself? I have looked up the tournament in Jousts, Japes and Jollity: A History of Wizarding Sport, Wizarding Diplomacy in Europe, 1450-1800, a few other places that were not very helpful and of course Hogwarts: A History, but I cannot seem to find out very much information._
> 
> _I would be very grateful for any advice. Please let us know how you are, also, if it is not rude to ask. I know that Harry enjoyed your lessons a lot, and we were all very sorry to see you leave._
> 
> _Yours sincerely,_
> 
> _Hermione Granger, former third year, friend of Harry Potter._

* * *

> _Dear Professor Lupin,_
> 
> _I am sorry for writing again. I do not know whether you received my last letter, but as I am sure you have heard by now, Harry is taking part in the Triwizard Tournament, which is being held at Hogwarts this year. He did well in the first task, but he has been putting very little effort into preparing for the second._
> 
> _I am sure that you are worried about him, because I am very much too. If you have any advice for him, I would be very glad to pass it on. He has been given a golden egg, which screeches when it is opened, if this means anything to you._
> 
> _I am sorry to be a pain, and I know that asking for help is technically against the rules. Since you have not seen the egg, though, I think that any general advice you can give would be fine: it is no secret that Harry is in the tournament, and I am sure that the other champions’ friends and families will be making suggestions._
> 
> _Yours sincerely,_
> 
> _Hermione Granger, fourth year._

There are some jottings on this letter – _Banshee, Ghoul, Mer, Phoenix_ – but they’ve all been crossed through.

* * *

> _Dear Professor Lupin,_
> 
> _The third task of the Triwizard Tournament is taking place at dusk on the twenty-fourth of June. I am sure that Harry would be delighted if you were able to attend, if only on behalf of our mutual friend who due to poor circumstances will not be able to come. Ron’s mum and his brother Bill will be there, but of course they are Ron’s family first and foremost. I think that it would be nice for Harry to have someone in the audience who –_

The end of this paragraph is scratched out.

> _I do not expect a reply, but I wanted to let you know. I hope that this letter finds you well._
> 
> _Yours sincerely,_
> 
> _Hermione Granger._

* * *

> _M – the old man wants me at yours. I’m writing this from a friend’s. There’s news, M, as discussed. Don’t come running; I’ll find you, no?_
> 
> _Did you have any luck tracking down fig rolls, while abroad?_

Harry feels certain that at least some of the blank parchment must be letters to and from Sirius. In the file with the newspaper clippings there are many more completed crosswords than there are pieces of correspondence, and the capital letters never match Lupin’s hand.

He’s not sure he dares try to read these letters, if they exist. He can figure out what Sirius means, at least, asking about fig rolls – there was an invitee who couldn’t come to the Order's reunion party, back in April. He has a feeling that the question _no_ indicates that Lupin should come and find Sirius at her house.

* * *

Harry has no idea what this letter’s about.

> _Dear J,_
> 
> _How wonderful to hear from you, after all these years! Hard to believe that it has been nearly a decade._
> 
> _Of course, I would prefer that in future you wrote with more pleasant news(!), but I understand your reasons for getting in touch, and appreciate the risk you are taking._
> 
> _As you might imagine, I am ignorant of all developments, and I suppose I can only hope that they remain ignorant of me. I find myself reluctant to put much that is personal in written correspondence, but my household remains as it was and sends you love. I have been told to remind you that there will always be a job here with your name on it._
> 
> _Let us know how everything turns out and take care of yourself, J. Thank you, thank you for getting in touch. I look forward to the all clear, and properly catching up._
> 
> _In every circumstance, your friend,_
> 
> _GD_

* * *

> _Dear Professor Lupin,_
> 
> _I’m sorry for bothering you. I don’t know if you know, but you should be expecting –_

The name here is scratched through.

> _I’m leaving Hogwarts tomorrow to go back to –_

This is scratched through as well.

> _If you could ask –_

What’s left at the bottom is only

> _Yours sincerely,_

The parchment seems to have been burned with a lighter.

At least he kept it, Harry supposes. That in itself risked exposing him, most likely.

* * *

“Harry.”

It’s the night before Harry goes back to Hogwarts, the thirty-first of August, a Sunday. He’s just been to see Mrs Figg, and he thinks that he’s in a good place, for term to start again (“How you’ve grown!”).

He’s been having to rush his summer work, and he’ll have to keep up with it, as they make their way to Christmas, but Draco’s at the Department this evening and he’s the flat to himself and he’s made it to chapter 5 of the new OWL textbook, marking it up with cross-references and all the better examples that the older books have.

“ _Harry_.”

He looks up from the spindly table, and Hermione’s standing there, fists on her hips. She’s in proportion with the room somehow, though no one could ever accuse her of being made from spindles. The ceiling reaches high above her head, the snow-white walls broad. The deep blue sofa complements the pale duck-egg colour of her muggle rugby shirt, two quadrants of it anyway, the other two white.

The shirt’s heavy with a white collar and buttons at the neck. Her hair is the colour of driftwood, lighter than in school because she gets it dyed. Two streaks of it went grey after the war and she hates it (“I look like a cartoon villain.”).

Harry wonders if she’ll maybe stay standing where she is, if he doesn’t reply.

“Are you really not ready for term?” she demands, out of phase with the world Harry’s in. “You’ve been working flat-out for weeks.”

She’s suspicious, Harry thinks. She’s also visibly pregnant now.

“There’s lots to do,” is how Harry covers his tracks, remembering to speak.

Hermione doesn’t look impressed. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the wedding,” she says, coming over to the table.

Thinking about his other work, Harry wonders if she and Lupin ever talked about the letters she sent, the reasons why Lupin never replied. “Can’t it wait?” he comes out with, not meaning to say it. The wedding won’t be until the baby’s at least three months old, and it’s only a bump at the moment. Molly’s just about coming round to the idea, because Ron had a word with his dad and Harry met up with Arthur and Molly for lunch.

And he didn’t say it was Draco, but he confirmed that he’s been seeing someone, because he couldn’t let it go

(“But is… Are they all right with the _distance?_ ” Molly asked him, looking concerned. She must have been listening to the radio, Harry thought at the time, because this wasn’t the pronoun he’d been expecting, no matter that it was the one he’d been using. “Hogwarts must be keeping you…”

“Harry is a wizard, Molly, don’t forget,” Arthur pointed out, a rather keen look in his eye from Harry’s description of his someone as _blond_ and _works with Hermione_.

Arthur would have been able to work it out from this description, if he hadn’t already known. It’s a bit of a cheat, but for now Harry counts it as telling him. 

“Yeah, it’s not too bad,” Harry hinted to Molly obliquely. “I see ‘em all the time.”

Poor Molly still looked worried. “But it must be difficult to find time _alone,_ with everyone in the house…”

“Well, er…” He didn’t lie. Arthur looked like he wanted to laugh. “It’s fine, yeah.”).

In proportion with the room, Hermione is frowning. “You’re always busy in September,” she says simply, justifying her appearance.

“All right,” Harry accepts, putting down his quill and feeling the cramp in his hand, the strain as he loosens his fingers. He wonders where Draco is, looking around and realising, glancing to the units and the windows, that it’s very much dark. “What’s so urgent?” he asks, turning back to Hermione.

She’s biting her lip as she sits down, and Harry’s stomach sinks. He’s not going to like whatever it is. “I’ve been thinking,” Hermione says unnecessarily. “I’ve spoken to Ron, and he says that he’s fine with whatever I want to do...” She rolls her eyes. “But he also said that we should tread carefully and that I should talk to you and that I’m not allowed to _push_.”

Harry can’t imagine Ron phrasing it this way, but Hermione does need to be told to leave off sometimes, the same way that Ron needs to be told to pull his finger out. “OK,” he allows.

“And I know that things are tense between you and Draco at the moment,” Hermione goes on, curling her hair behind her ears, not very effectively.

“What?” This is the first word that Harry’s heard about it. He frowns.

Hermione gives him a look. “You’ve been avoiding him,” she points out. “Ever since Remus disappeared. I can tell that he’s cut up about it,” she suggests, with plain judgement. “He blames himself for shouting at you. I believe that you called him _melodramatic._ ”

Harry shakes his head, feeling in his hands as he holds them up in front of him. “I’ve not been avoiding anyone,” he complains. He tries to remember when he last spoke to Draco, and it was this morning, surely, after he’d finished in the bathroom and Draco was dozing and Harry told him to have a nice day at work before he took Lupin’s briefcase and went to work on it in the shed. “And how is it _not_ being melodramatic, to…” Although Harry’s not sure that he said this, actually.

In any case, his suggestion does not meet with Hermione’s approval. She rests her elbow on the table and her face against her fist and she looks at him, unimpressed. “Stop being a boy, Harry,” she instructs. “Talk about your feelings like a _girl_.”

Harry can feel his face turning hot. “You were saying about the wedding,” he reminds her.

“Yes,” says Hermione, before sighing, dropping her arm as though in exclamation. She sits up again and drums her fingers on the tabletop, ash. “There’s no easy way to suggest this, but I’ll explain myself anyway. I’ve decided that I want something traditional,” she explains, looking at her hand, her glinting rainbow ring. “I want an English country wedding in an English country house, because I don’t want the day to be pretentious and I want all our friends to come. I want it to be _meaningful_ ,” she adds, looking up. “I’m rather fond of Ron, really, in the end.” She admits this as though it’s embarrassing. “We’ve been together a long time.”

Now, Harry could have told her most of this weeks ago – _years_. But there’s something else in what she’s saying, Harry’s sure of it. Nerves kick in.

“At its core,” Hermione now poses the question, meeting Harry’s eyes with brown, “what is a wedding but a ritual of light magic? It’s a ritual of blessing,” she insists, “and they’re never efficient, by design. It’s a transfer to me and Ron – our relationship – but it’s also a great release, shared by everyone who’s with us, as long as they wish us well.”

On the edge of working it out, Harry’s heart is in his throat.

Hermione’s jaw sets firmly, and she doesn’t look away from Harry’s gaze. “I was thinking about this, and then I thought – I know a country house.”

“What?” Instinct twists in Harry’s gut, distracting. He looks away to empty white walls, Draco’s bookcase; he looks back. “ _No,_ ” Harry tells Hermione, reading her face.

Hermione is frowning, as though Harry is being very rude not to let her finish her point. “I thought to myself that I _know_ a country house,” she repeats, determined. “I know a country house that is tainted by dark magic.” Her eyes are clear and hard, agate. “I know a country house that we have sitting idle like a cancer, which would make excellent accommodation for a young couple and their growing family, who cannot live with their grown-up son forever.”

For a moment Harry thinks that she’s talking about herself and Ron.

“I mean…” Hermione’s still finishing her thought, and Harry can’t see it, where it ends. He doesn’t know when this happened, because it can’t have been in the last couple of weeks. “You-Know-Who destroyed their house in Godric’s Hollow, so it seems rather nice, doesn’t it? The idea that your mum and dad should end up reclaiming the house he called his.”

Harry stares at her. All he can think is, “You’ve been talking to Andromeda.” The woman who buried a muggleborn, a halfblood and a werewolf in the grave plot of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.

Hermione shrugs into her hair, and Harry doesn’t know if he thinks that this is revenge or not. “Most things about dark magic aren’t written down,” is all that she says. Harry finds himself thinking of everything that Dumbledore used to say about love.

It was nice, all of that, though Harry’s been having a bit of a downer on Dumbledore, of late. He’s not sure that he _told_ Lupin, in so many terms, to cut himself off, but –

“Change doesn’t happen on its own, Harry,” Hermione’s insisting, and she’s been fired up by all the stuff with Harry’s mum and dad. “We have to make it happen. We have to seize every opportunity we can.”

“How d’you even know that they want to move out?” Harry asks, because he can’t even _think_ of why they might need to, for the moment. “And it’s your _wedding_ …”

And yet Hermione looks at him with pity, much rounder underneath her rugby shirt than at the start of the summer, refusing to let him avoid it. “Do you not talk to them at all?” she asks, and Harry thinks that this is unfair. “They’re trying very, very hard to have your brother or sister and they’re facing such problems; it’s cruel to make them live in a house with a newborn. There’s one coming, in case you haven’t noticed,” she points out, her brown eyes sincere, elbows on the table. “You and Draco might want us gone, when you hear them, when all their _things_ are taking up space.”

Harry glances around at the flat’s kitchen. It’s more living space than he needs. The shed would be fine. “Why would we make you and Ron move out?” he asks, before remembering that the house is technically his.

The look that Hermione’s giving him is warm. “I know that you and Draco like your minimalism,” she prods, looking towards the flat’s walls, for which she chose the colour.

“Draco hates it,” Harry points out, and he doesn’t need to think about it. “He’s never sussed out what he likes. He just buys things that’re expensive.”

This comes out like a joke, because Harry finds it hilarious, for no reason, and his tone is much too revealing, but Hermione smiles lightly, as though they’re in a normal conversation. “And you don’t buy things at all,” she suggests.

Harry struggles, but in the end he says, “No.”

“Will you talk to him about it?” Hermione asks with empathy, as though it’s possible that this could happen. “I mean,” she returns to chastising, “not when you apologise for calling him a proxy of nearly _every_ homophobic slur –”

“How the hell am I being accused of that?”

“– but another time. In the next couple of weeks,” she pulls the loops of the bow.

“What am I asking him?” Harry demands, slightly wound up. “If it’s all right for us to co-opt the house that his parents _died_ in to have a big party?” They _cannot_ fill Malfoy Manor with Screaming Streamers. It would be –

“I wouldn’t phrase it like that,” Hermione suggests, and it’s infuriating, because she knows that Harry won’t say no. He should have seen this coming; there’s a smile on her face, daring and nerve. “Ease into it,” she twists the knife. “Play it by ear.”

And the thing is, Harry thinks later, lying in bed and waiting for Draco to come home, pretending to be asleep – he couldn’t apologise tonight if he wanted to. Mrs Figg gave him a memory, and he thinks that it might finish off his understanding of 1995. Tonight’s the last chance he’ll have before October, most likely, to break into Draco’s office and borrow his pensieve.


	11. Another world, part 5

Now, Harry has a bad feeling about breaking into Draco’s office. He assumes that it’s guilt, because Draco won’t be impressed if and when he finds out. He will in all likelihood find out; he has a habit of catching Harry in the act.

But then – Draco only once complained about Harry breaking into his bedroom, and he likely didn’t think much about breaking into Harry’s rooms at Hogwarts, back in May. They live together, and Harry wants to believe that this adds up to more than their shared occupancy of Grimmo’s third floor.

So what is he worried about?

Well.

It’s past midnight when Draco returns to the flat, the first of September. Harry’s awake, pretending to be asleep. He gets up when Draco’s settled and sneaks out of bed to the landing, where he disapparates directly to Draco’s office at the Department of Mysteries, because he’s learned the way in.

When he appears there, lights are already on. There’s someone else, snuck in and startled to see him.

It’s Harry’s dad, and even stumbling in surprise Harry thinks that he should have seen this coming.

There in the office with its walls full of books and its desk made of cypress, Harry stares at his father. It’s weird, mostly, to look at him directly and to be looked at back. Harry’s been following him for two weeks now, and he’s accepted the idea that he can’t be seen if he can see James Potter, outside of number 12, Grimmauld Place.

The question comes out of him, disbelieving, “ _Dad?_ ”

The canary cheeps, near the door, and a conversation which Harry was distracted for drifts into his head. Draco’s given the canary the name of Thelxinoe, after one of the sirens from Greek mythology (“The seductive power of _knowledge_ , Harry.”).

Wide-eyed and shocked like prey, Harry’s dad is standing in the corner at the back of the office. There’s a pensieve there. The man is holding a vial and a wand in his hand, swirling memory beside him.

The pensive isn’t in fact an old Malfoy heirloom, Harry’s been told. The limestone stand very much is: thirteenth-century from France, carved with angry-looking knights holding swords standing guard. But the sieve that came with it was used as a punchbowl at the turn of the twentieth century, and unsurprisingly, as a result, it no longer works (“A _punchbowl._ ”). The replacement is pure white – alabaster – carved so thin that it’s translucent near the rim. It’s covered in clarifying runes, the memory thin cloud.

“What’s that in there?” Harry asks James, shaking himself, holding his own vial of white smoke.

James blinks, looking at him. He doesn’t seem to know how to answer. “Nothing,” he says.

Raising his eyebrows, Harry waits. He’s dealt many times with students performing illegal activities.

With a sigh, James yields to the inevitable. He glances around at the shelves of Malfoy’s books. “Your mother, Padfoot and I have been tracing Moony’s movements through the eighties,” he says. “To find clues about where he’s gone.”

Harry’s not sure how to say that he’s been wanting to _help_. Also, he thought that they’d been busy with the cause of the gay liberation. “When have you been doing that?”

“Well –” James seems to find this question confusing. “I see your mother all the time.”

Harry imagines them plotting in their pyjamas every night as they get into bed. It doesn’t seem unlikely, now that he thinks about it. It would explain why they never need to catch up over breakfast.

He doesn’t want to know any more. Clearly his stalking has been about as comprehensive as it always was. “Yeah, all right; fine.”

But James seems to be on a roll. He nods towards the pensieve. “This is from a couple of weeks that Moony spent on Dung Fletcher’s floor. It’s not interesting,” he laments. “Mundungus is an extorting piece of shit.”

And Harry can’t help himself. “How’d you get that out of him?”

James shrugs, as though this isn’t of interest. “Sirius took him out drinking.”

Really, Harry thinks, he would have made the worst ruddy auror in the world.

“I’ve been reading Moony’s letters,” Harry admits anyway, and it makes James laugh, which puts Harry off. “I found his old briefcase in Andromeda’s loft,” he manages to explain. “I can’t make sense of most of what’s…”

“We should join efforts,” James suggests amicably, making Harry look up. “There’s a couple of moments…” Twitching his glasses, James looks embarrassed, and this makes sense too. “Your godfather’s been good about smudging the lens.”

Harry refuses to parse this thought. He shakes his head. “How’d you get in here?” he asks.

Immediately James brandishes a fold of parchment from inside his robes. “Hermione’s old library pass. Moony left it behind.” He grins winningly. “A piece of good luck, really. Moony was officially dead when she issued it, so it’s terribly vague.” He gives Harry a look as though they’re both _certain_ that this is a shame.

Harry tries not to laugh, but he grins reflexively before he can stop it.

“What’s that in your hand?” James asks him back.

Harry looks down at the vial. “It’s from Mrs Figg,” he begins. He’s – not sure that he wants to explain, now, thinking about it. “Sirius stopped by her house in 1995.”

“Yes, I know,” James informs him.

Harry doesn’t let this get to him, shaking his head. “He stayed there for a couple of days. She was telling me about it, and then she said that there was something I should see.”

“All right,” James agrees, narrowing his eyes as though confused by Harry’s tone. “I mean, your mother and I never had much to do with her, but she was around from time to time. She had a sister in the Ministry who couldn’t be seen conspiring with Moody,” he recounts. “And her husband was very well respected in the Office. One of the first assassinations.” He says this easily, but it’s nothing that Harry’s ever known.

Harry fidgets with the hem of his t-shirt, not sure what his intestines are telling him, not trusting them. “I went to see her,” he repeats, looking down at the vial. “She had a really weird look on her face,” he admits (“Harry, please believe that I thought it was best.”).

With a turn in his stomach, Harry wants to go home. He doesn’t want to be here, doing this. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He feels like he’s being Harry Potter, and he doesn’t want to be him. He wants to be back at the house in his bed and a Hufflepuff, holding his insomniac boyfriend close until he feels warm.

Draco must know that he’s missing, Harry thinks. He’ll be thinking through the places that Harry could have gone. He’ll put a stop to all this. He’ll catch them

(“Harry, what are you doing?”).

His dad is looking at him, and if nothing else, then he’s the best friend of Harry’s godfather. “I haven’t got anywhere with the eighties,” Harry says, looking down towards Draco’s tilted desk. It’s clean and minimal, which Draco hates, though he likes to be tidy. “There’s this letter from a GD, which says that in 95 he – or she, I s’pose – hasn’t heard from Moony in a decade.”

“What’s the memory, Harry?” his dad interrupts, apparently able to see straight through him.

“Mrs Figg wouldn’t tell me,” Harry says, looking down at it, feeling peculiar, feeling like he doesn’t know where or who he is. “I’m not sure about it. I don’t –”

“We’ll watch it together,” James concludes, as if he knows exactly what’s going on.

Harry looks down at the vial again. “Can’t I see yours first?”

Glancing at the pensieve, James sighs. “It’s only depressing. But you should…” He draws his wand, stringing the memory from the pensieve back into the vial he’s holding, which Harry now realises has a little parchment tag tied around its neck. “You haven’t clocked it yet, have you?” he suggests, oddly guarded. Bittersweet. “Why Moony left.”

They’re looking at each other, and they’re basically strangers, Harry thinks, no matter how much he tries to understand. There’s so much that he doesn’t know about his dad, and so much that his dad doesn’t know about him.

“Have you realised how much he cares?” James asks Harry directly.

Harry’s not sure if he’s realised anything.

Once the vial of Mundungus Fletcher’s memory is stoppered, James tucks it inside his robes and draws out another – puts that away, once he’s checked the tag and brings out one that he’s content with. He looks at it, turning it over. The expression in his murky eyes is concerned.

“He’ll have convinced himself that your mother and I would despise him,” James says. “The moment that Sirius returned to tell us the facts.” His expression is wry, exasperated, fond. “And when he found out that you… He’s always had difficulty expressing himself,” he finishes, looking at Harry. He takes what seems to be a fortifying breath, up his nose.

“OK?” Harry suggests, not sure what he’s in for.

His dad looks at him squarely, concerned, but then he nods and unstoppers the vial. “You should know before you go in…”

* * *

_Where has he been, Albus?_

Disorientated, Harry looks up. This is November 1981, he knows. He told his dad that he was fine with it. The past can’t hurt him. And it’s fine, it’s – 

_Fontainebleu. The forest._

With a rush, Harry realises that nothing is fine. He’s in the head’s office at Hogwarts, and it looks the same as it did when he was twelve.

Oh no.

Professor Dumbledore is pacing in front of his desk, fingers smoothing the end of his beard. He’s wearing purple and orange, and he looks sprightly, alive. Adrenaline floods through Harry’s nerves, and he doesn’t know how to react. Every reason that he’s here escapes from his head.

Around them, devices whir. They make the hair on Harry’s arms bristle – he looks to Fawkes, who’s so beautiful, so present, bright red and gold. Harry’s forgotten. Underneath his feet there are beautiful rugs, like Draco’s, even if they’re newer and more colourful. They’re the reason, Harry realises, why he’s always loved Draco’s rug.

 _So far afield? What was he to learn from Fontainebleu?_

Beside Harry, as though not long emerged from the floo, there’s Professor McGonagall. A generation younger than in 2008, she’s younger than Andromeda to Harry’s eyes. Her hair is not yet entirely grey, and her demeanour is less controlled than Harry thinks of it, almost fiery.

This is her memory, Harry knows, and it makes her difficult to look at directly.

 _All knowledge is power,_ says Dumbledore with irony, his eyes twinkling as he cracks a wry grin. His expression is in no way free of distress.

Stomach clenching, Harry’s eyes sting, and he’s filled with a sense of yearning. This is what people forget, he feels more than thinks. Dumbledore’s charisma was a physical thing – no portrait can replicate it. Even in this memory, Harry feels like a compass needle lost in oil, drawn towards north. McGonagall is focused the same way.

He’s holding out an arm, now, Dumbledore, to the chair in front of his desk. He always used to have a plan. McGonagall takes the instruction easily. In a single neat turn on his heels, Dumbledore retreats to his own chair, while McGonagall reaches for a sherbet lemon, out of character, tucking it into her mouth.

Because this is a memory, Harry knows exactly how the boiled sweet tastes, sweet and sharp.

 _For how long?_ McGonagall’s asking, the lemon clacking against her teeth. _And how many times? Did you take the boy straight from school…?_

“Did you know what it would do to me?” Harry blurts out before he can stop himself, wishing that Dumbledore would look up at him again. This question has never fallen from the tip of his tongue, but he’s forgotten it, Harry realises, after all these years of swallowing.

In the corner, on his stand, Fawkes chirrups, grooming himself.

 _Minerva, he volunteered,_ Dumbledore is saying to McGonagall, sounding more Scottish than he ever did, somehow.

Harry moves over to the phoenix, trailing fingers half an inch above the bird’s gleaming plumage. Even in the memory, Fawkes feels warm, protective, loving. He looks at Harry with bright unseeing eyes, and Harry sucks in a breath.

_They all did. James and Frank came to Alastor –_

_And now James and Frank are both lost to us,_ McGonagall is saying.

 _Yes,_ says Dumbledore, with feeling.

And Harry knows that they’re talking about Lupin, but he finds words in this throat nonetheless, tumbling loose. “Walking into that forest, I… It really messed me up,” he tells Fawkes, but the phoenix doesn’t react. No one’s looking at Harry – and the paintings always do, when he’s here.

It’s pointless, saying these things, Harry tells himself. Dumbledore’s white tomb will sit on Hogwarts’ grounds until the castle collapses; his portrait will hang in this office with the others for centuries – but neither of these things can give him answers, and this memory never will either.

Fawkes chirrups, very softly, and it makes Harry sniff as his fingers pass through insubstantial feathers, warm like a southern breeze.

“You used to read my mind when I was twelve, and I don’t…” This is a stupid thing to focus on, Harry knows, but it always comes back to him. Why did you do that? he thinks. It happened the first time he entered this room, after arriving with Ron in the car. “Why did you do that?” he asks out loud, because there’s no one to hear him, even as he turns around. The sound escapes into nothing, dead with no echo. This isn’t the reason he’s here. “And fifth year –” I don’t know anyone who still believes that you cared about me.

 _We have two boys without parents,_ McGonagall is saying, making it difficult for Harry to forget himself. _More losses than I have been able to bear counting. The most promising student of my career –_

 _Everyone used to tell me that James…_ Dumbledore begins, and Harry looks at him directly again. He looks jovial, full of love. Kind and clever, worthy of trust.

Harshly, McGonagall scoffs, sounding impatient. She’s always been Gryffindor, Harry supposes. _Miss Evans was more talented in Charms,_ she says shortly, and her tone makes Harry grin, despite himself. _Miss Bletchley’s runes were more elegant, and he learned all of his Herbology from Miss Dearborn._

 _Yes,_ says Dumbledore, smiling almost indulgently.

But McGonagall isn’t finished. _It was to James’s credit that by the time he left this castle he knew it – most likely at the instruction of Miss McKinnon…_ She smiles, strangely, shaking her head before frowning with grief. _He was the best chaser that Gryffindor has seen in ten years, the best captain I’ve ever appointed. I used to imagine him leading all of us._ She returns to her point, stern. _But you know and I know from whom he learnt his Transfiguration –_

 _Yes,_ says Dumbledore simply.

 _I did not become a teacher to watch my brightest students turn on each other,_ McGonagall concludes, sitting back, going somewhere else.

There’s a wildness to this McGonagall, Harry thinks. Claws and teeth. Highly restrained and waspish in their expression, but very much there.

 _James…_ she’s going on, almost exhausted. _James was always putting himself in harm’s way, and Lily never cared a whit about… Their end, I can understand it,_ she interrupts herself. _But Peter?_ she exclaims, as though this has not yet gone in, even as weeks have now passed. _The boy who used to bounce around the castle like a beachball? And the boy who bounced him?_

Leaning back in his chair, twirling the end of his beard in his fingers, Dumbledore looks more real talking to McGonagall than he ever did when Harry knew him, Harry thinks. His eyes flicker from the fireplace to Fawkes, and Harry longs for him to look a foot to the right.

As far as Dumbledore and McGonagall believe in Sirius’s guilt, Harry supposes, battering this feeling down, they never saw it coming. He wonders what that did to them, over the next ten years.

 _Sirius had vulnerabilities,_ Dumbledore says in the end, earnest.

Again, McGonagall scoffs. _Call a spade a spade,_ she says directly, sounding like herself. _He came from a family of supremacists and he was queer as a peacock. He reminded you of –_

 _No need to go on,_ Dumbledore interrupts with a stern look.

And there’s so much, Harry thinks, that he never caught on about.

 _There is much that you could convince me of,_ McGonagall tells Dumbledore more carefully, clacking the sherbet lemon against her teeth. The portraits are too quiet, Harry thinks, though that may be because Phineas Nigellus isn’t in his frame. _If you could convince me that he felt – a passion for…_ As though she’s eating something more sour than her sweet, McGonagall screws up her mouth. _A hatred for Lily Potter,_ she settles on, though it’s clear that she doesn’t believe it. _But then you send me to check over his flat –_

Harry swallows, because he doesn’t think that it’s disgust in her voice – but it’s surprise, almost scandal. It’s Molly Weasley (“Goodness, I never!").

 _This is something that I did not know,_ says Dumbledore shortly, and Harry is certain that he knows what they’re talking about.

 _Did you ever see Sirius on his own?_ McGonagall asks, sitting straight in her chair, and it seems to Harry as though she’s changing the subject. _He was always his most difficult at the beginning of the year – when he came back after the holidays…_

_We cannot retain students against their own and their parents’ stated wishes –_

_He used to snap and snarl like a neglected pet. And now I find out that for the past two years –_

_I refuse to blame Remus’s absence for…_ This interruption starts off firm from Dumbledore, but by the end he seems to find himself at a loss. _What will the aurors have found?_ he returns abruptly to business, his eyes sharp on McGonagall, sitting up in his purple and orange robes, steepling his fingers to his lips

 _They were both more than discreet about – that, and about any involvement with the Order,_ McGonagall informs him, her tone damning, Harry thinks. _I transfigured the office to a second bedroom; I set the owl free, with instructions to come to the castle if it didn’t like the wild. The evidence will have said that they lived as two bachelors in a cordial arrangement._

 _Good,_ says Dumbledore neatly, as though this has left it settled.

And this is the moment that the fire flares, and Remus Lupin steps out of the floo.

 _Ah,_ says Dumbledore, reacting. 

Remus looks – weirdly like a young Bill Weasley, Harry thinks, stepping closer to Fawkes. Sirius was right. Harry’s forgotten how many scars Lupin used to have, but there are a lot, white lines clear scratches on his clean-shaven, youthful face. He has Bill’s lurching energy from when Harry was a teenager, though his hair is cropped short. It looks edgy in the same way as Bill’s ponytail, and Harry supposes that they’ve just come out of the seventies, when everyone’s hair was long.

Like Bill, Remus is wearing dark colours – heavy boots and tar-coloured jeans, a deep brown roll-neck jumper with an ugly cardigan over the top. His skin is covered in heavy, patchy freckles as though he’s been spending days outside. They’re almost the same colour as his hair, gleaming gold-blond.

He looks like he loathes everything that light has ever touched, and he stinks of cigarette smoke.

 _Remus,_ Dumbledore tries, standing up. McGonagall rises too, the sherbet lemon not visible in her mouth as she turns around her chair.

Harry stays as close to Fawkes’ warmth as possible. He misses Lupin, he realises, with a sting like a knife. He feels as though he’s grieving.

_Dear boy –_

_Something’s happened,_ Remus interrupts, very clipped. He doesn’t raise his voice. He must have sent a patronus ahead for the floo to be open; he’s urgent as though he hasn’t paused for one second since sending it. McGonagall must have been here for another meeting – it will be near the end of term. _Even Sirius wouldn’t leave the flat in that state,_ Remus goes on, looking at Dumbledore like a predator. _What do you know?_

McGonagall looks entirely taken aback, as though she doesn’t recognise the man in front of her.

Against his attack, Dumbledore hardens. The colours of his robes don’t look whimsical; they look like raw magic. _How well would you say that you know Mr Black, Remus?_ he asks.

It’s suspicion, Harry thinks, in his tone. It’s unexpected. McGonagall looks as surprised as Harry feels, turning to Dumbledore, but she doesn’t say a word.

 _Well enough,_ comes Remus’s insolent reply, and he doesn’t back down. _We met at the Welcome Feast and shared a room for seven years. Such a thing forges bonds._

No one says anything.

Eyes narrowing, Remus seems to realise that he is not being asked an idle question. Dumbledore is waiting; he goes on. _There was a brief period of estrangement,_ he offers, dry. _He and James made a go of it and I thought that I might as well try living alone. But as I believe you’re aware,_ he adds with an insincere smile, _James soon solved the problem of not being married and I realised that the difference between living alone and living in a room with James, Sirius and Peter egging them on…_ He finishes neatly, with polish, _It was rather too extreme for my nerves._

For the first time, Harry realises why Lupin would have been so good behind enemy lines. Even knowing as much as he knows of the truth, he finds the lie of this convincing.

McGonagall is covering her mouth with her hand, just for a moment, and Harry can only imagine what she’s feeling.

 _Remus,_ says Dumbledore, and his tone makes Harry wince, it’s so kind and patient. _I have some distressing news. You must forgive an old man,_ he says, still young, _because I do not know where to begin –_

 _He’s dead, isn’t he?_ Remus interrupts, as though the prospect is more irritating than anything. His amber eyes are burning. Harry spots their colour as his gaze drifts for a moment, calculations surely running through his head, a hundred feelings through his chest, none of them legible.

 _No,_ Dumbledore tells him. _No – I’m afraid…_

_Then he’s the spy._

Even though he knows it isn’t true, Harry’s stomach drops away. A huffing laugh escapes from Remus, bitter and flat, and it’s horrible.

He’s glaring at one of the whirring devices. _He is the spy,_ he spits, as though he should have seen it coming.

Swallowing, Harry doesn’t need to listen as Dumbledore explains everything that happened to his parents, to Sirius and Wormtail. It seems to take forever, and Harry wants to correct the mistakes.

“He wasn’t _laughing_ because he found it _funny_ …”

There’s a fierce look on Remus’s face, and Harry wonders if he knows this too. He seems to think better of suggesting any familiarity with Sirius’s motivations or moods.

When silence falls, it’s heavy and thick. McGonagall is looking at the ceiling, clearly taking comfort in her sherbet lemon.

 _You mean to tell me,_ is all that Remus says, dangerously enough that Harry steps back, oddly bounced off an insubstantial cabinet, _that as of three weeks ago I have been gathering intelligence in aid of a war that’s – already been won?_

This response seems to wrong-foot Dumbledore, momentarily. He pauses.

McGonagall steps forward –

– but Remus rears away from her, taking a step and re-focusing on the headmaster. _Where’s Harry?_

Harry jumps, because –

His dad didn’t mention –

 _Remus,_ Dumbledore is saying, purple and orange and controlled and lost for words. _I can only imagine what a shock this must –_

 _Don’t evade the question,_ Remus bites out, lurching. _He’s alive, you were saying. So where is he?_

 _He’s safe,_ says McGonagall, and Harry’s heart is beating fast. This wasn’t… _Hidden from anyone who would harm him._

Sharply, Remus turns to her. _With whom?_ he demands, before turning his glare directly on Dumbledore. _Alice and Frank are out of the game, you’re telling me,_ he says awfully. _Mackers is dead; Dorcas is dead._ His tone is brutal, hammering out the names of everyone who could have been Harry’s guardian. _Mary got out years ago. His grandparents…_ Another short laugh, insolent and sarcastic. _Dromeda would take him, but I don’t imagine that she’s made the list._

 _Dromeda…?_ McGonagall asks, confused.

 _Everyone whom he might recognise is dead,_ Remus concludes, terrible to look at. _Unavailable,_ he jokes, surely barely holding himself together. He’s glaring at Dumbledore as though he wishes that a sword would fall out of the sky and pierce him through. _Or me,_ he concludes, and Harry doesn’t… _So where have you put him?_

_Remus, I cannot give you that information,_ Dumbledore says, entirely in control and suspicious, not trusting himself. _From now until he comes to Hogwarts, Harry’s safety and privacy –_

 _Absolute – bollocks!_ Remus declares, out of control and sounding like Harry’s dad. Something dies.

McGonagall jumps, presumably to take points.

 _Do you fear my conspiracy?_ Remus demands, still ready to laugh, and Harry’s sure that he knows how he feels – as though he’s given everything and it’s still not been enough. _Do you think I had a hand in killing them?_

 _Not at all, my boy,_ Dumbledore tries.

 _Then I should like to know who has taken custody of my best friend’s son,_ Remus thunders, all of him violent.

Again, it only makes Dumbledore harden, into granite, his colours igneous, mineral.

 _Harry has become a great deal more than any of us can imagine,_ Dumbledore begins, and Harry feels sick. _He is already famous. They call him the boy who –_

 _Not to me,_ Remus says squarely, sounding desperate now, and it makes Harry’s eyes burn hot. His throat is hot. _To me he’s James and Lily’s baby. He’s Harry; where have you put him? He’s ours, curse you –_

_Remus –_

He says something ridiculous. _He’s mine –_

_Remυς, πλεα..._

Harry yanks his head out of the pensieve.

He turns back over his feet, and someone says his name.

As the real world swirls into existence, Harry is certain that he’s going to be sick. He’s too hot: it’s in his throat, in his head, in his chest, his arms and legs, which can’t hold him up.

There’s another world out there, he’s struck by the thought of, his heart pounding, his eyes stinging in the light. There are three different worlds, where he’s Neville’s brother, Tonks’s brother, Moony’s son.

He knew it before, but this is different. This is proof that he’s not the only one who’s imagined it.

“Why did you show me that?” he asks whoever will hear him, not really shouting, feeling entirely out of control, down a tunnel, down a well with deep water at the bottom. Draco’s office is lines, all clean lines and books and a clean desk and it’s beautiful, it’s minimal, it’s too much – “Why did you –?”

“ _Harry_ ,” a dream says, there in Draco’s office, too real and too present, warm. He presses a chaser’s certain hand into Harry’s hair as though his head’s a quaffle, pushing mess away from his forehead, his scar, and it’s too warm, it’s burning, too hot. “Harry, it was a long time ago; we’re all here.”

Eyes are set in Harry’s vision, not grey, not pale or dark. Hazel. Brown edged with blue, vivid colours not green. Harry stared at them for hours, once upon a time.

Like nausea, Harry feels the will to escape himself under his ribs. He presses his hands to his glasses and his glasses to his eyes. He can’t remember how old he is. How old is he? He can’t remember what his name is, what year it is –

He’s been trying so desperately not to need them. If he doesn’t need anyone, then he can survive on his own. That’s logical, isn’t it? Logic.

(“The rule of the first Principal Exception…”)

“Harry, I’m sorry.” He looks confused, this image from a mirror, brushing Harry’s hair back, which shouldn’t be making him jitter. “I know that growing up with Moony would have been more fun than the suburbs, but I don’t –”

It’s all been too much, hasn’t it? Harry’s had some sort of psychological break, and now he’s imagining his dad, who must be Ron or Arthur Weasley or Kreacher… He’s been imagining everything; he’s been imagining that Malfoy, _Malfoy_ –

Why the fuck would _Malfoy_ fall in love with him? What kind of sick desperation –

“Harry,” Oliver Wood is telling him. “You have a memory. What’s the memory?”

“No,” Harry says, shaking his head, not sure if he’s laughing or failing to cry. He’s failing to breathe; he’s making too much noise and someone will find him.

“You’re right,” now Cedric Diggory’s tutting, hand on Harry’s shoulder because Harry’s fourteen and they’re about to enter a maze, take hold of a cup. “That’s – I’m being thick. We’ll go home; we’ll… Your mum. We’ll go and find your mum, yes? Or Draco –”

These stupid names; all this nonsense –

“ _No_ ,” Harry says, much more forcefully. There’s a vial in his front pocket, he can feel it. He pulls it out and there’s something swirling inside. Reality. He drew this out of Mrs Figg’s head, and he hasn’t seen Mrs Figg in a decade. The last time he saw her, he didn’t know the spell, and she couldn’t have done it herself. She’s obsessed by her cats. Who cares about _cats?_

Shutting his eyes once more, Harry bites down on his teeth, forcing his pieces together. He looks at the memory again, and he looks at James Potter, not his dad, which is the only way to make sense of all this. “We’re getting Moony back, you said,” he accuses, pulling away from James’s hand.

The man is watching him, his expression canny, full of confusion, and Harry can read it as easily as breathing.

The lines of Draco’s office are clean. The pensieve is full of 1981.

“Get that out of there,” Harry instructs, unstoppering his own vial, determined. He doesn’t want to see Lupin with Sirius, because they were both supposed to be like Harry, surviving alone, not desperately needing each other. But he’ll persevere. All knowledge is power. “Let’s get this done,” he insists, shutting off his instincts as he pours.

* * *

Entering the pensieve to look at Mrs Figg’s memory, Harry feels the urge to run, but he doesn’t move. He and James find themselves in a chintzy, carpeted living room, and the smell sends Harry straight back to childhood, even more than Dumbledore’s office. It’s raw litter and stale air, he thinks now, the effect of which is like over-boiled cabbage. The heating is on, and it’s two or three degrees too warm.

Harry breathes, but all he breathes is this smell, and he feels hot and sick.

Some sort of gameshow is playing on the massive, outdated television, the studio audience laughing at a cheesy one-liner. Arabella Figg is watching with a packet of pink wafer biscuits. They’re open on a sofa cushion, the ground of which is teal.

She looks younger than Harry expects her to, like McGonagall. She’s wearing glasses, and they’re huge on her face.

A ginger and a tabby cat are asleep in the armchair, here in the chintzy living room, while a longhaired black kneazle-cross, Harry suspects from the size, is stalking down the settee behind Mrs Figg’s head.

“Oh, look, that’s Mildred!” James remarks suddenly, surprised, looking at the cat, caring a great deal.

“Who’s Mildred?” Harry asks, his heart tilting.

“She’s your mum’s cat,” comes the answer. The world skews as James steps forward. The cat looks up, as though she’s seen him, but then she settles for watching the phantom TV, her eyes glinting mirrors.

Harry remembers the cat. He remembers reading about it and supposing it perished.

Crookshanks was grown in 1993, Harry thinks, and he died in 2005. This cat was part of his mum and dad’s household in 1981, ten years before, so it fits that she was alive into the nineties.

He must have seen the cat dozens of times, in the end, after terrorising it on his broom.

“The Gryffindor girls used to spend the lunch hour up at the treeline,” James is saying, as though he can’t help telling the story. Harry tries not to latch onto it desperately, imagining every colour and word in his head. “There were seven of them in our year. They’d sit their cats on the back of their brooms and flock down to the greenhouses for Tuesday Herbology.” He’s shaking his head. “Your mum would wink at me; I swear she would wink.” After a pause, he concedes, “And then Milly would pounce and make me trip over.”

Harry snorts, because he’s not sure how else to respond and because he forgets, in the moment, that he doesn’t laugh when his dad’s telling stories.

“I cannot believe that Figg ended up with her,” James complains about the cat, looking around at the living room indignant.

“The décor’s just as bad as I remember it,” Harry says to distract him. He’s getting a headache, he thinks, and he’s not sure that this should be possible.

“And when were you ever here?” James asks him directly, and it’s bizarre. He twitches his glasses up his face.

Harry looks at him, reminded of how much his dad doesn’t know. He doesn’t reply.

The doorbell rings at this point, and Mrs Figg gets up to answer it.

“That must be Sirius,” Harry declares, no matter how much feels off. His dad is frowning, as though he also doesn’t think that this can be right.

Because they should have followed, really, they’re pulled out of the living room just as the door opens, into the floral-wallpapered hallway, and it turns out that it isn’t Sirius at all.

It’s Remus Lupin, evidently older than in McGonagall’s memory. And yet definitely younger than he’s ever been in Harry’s own. He might well be younger than Harry is now.

Which means this can’t be the nineties.

Harry doesn’t know how to make sense of this.

Lupin looks drawn, wearing beige. He’s very scarred, Harry thinks, looking at his hands, at his face. He thought the same in McGonagall’s memory – but he looks so tired here, it makes the scars look worse. He reminds Harry of Draco in the way that he’s holding himself, from a couple of years ago or maybe from now. His hair is going grey, though it’s not yet easy to tell, and he smells of fresh cigarette smoke, which goes awfully with the cabbage.

He’s young, that’s the point. He’s too young.

 _Goodness!_ says Mrs Figg, to see him on the step. Margaret Thatcher, Harry thinks. That’s who Mrs Figg’s glasses remind him of.

He stops here.

 _Hello Arabella,_ says Lupin, with the tightest of smiles. _Terribly sorry to bother you. I imagine that this is quite a shock._ He’s trying to seem affable and unthreatening, Harry thinks, but he looks slightly too hungry to pull it off. _A mutual friend suggested that we might like to catch up._ He’s hinting at something, and Harry assumes that he means Dumbledore, or intends to mean him.

 _Remus Lupin, well I never,_ Mrs Figg finally greets him, recovering. _Come in, come in. Is this about…?_ She looks a little shifty. _Well, I suppose that I know what this is about._

She could still mean Sirius, couldn’t she? This could be the summer, maybe, of 1993, even if that would make Lupin thirty-three and he doesn’t look that age at all.

Rather than responding to Mrs Figg’s question, in the memory, Lupin nods genially, smiling as he crosses the threshold, and there’s something in his eyes.

Not far from Harry’s side, James huffs a laugh. “Very slick there, Moony,” he comments, sounding fond. “Ten out of ten.”

And there’s a pang in Harry’s heart, because – _no_.

(“He’s mine.”)

_Would you care for some tea?_

Mrs Figg is clearly expecting the answer no as they move back to the living room, but Lupin seems willing to ignore all her cues. _Oh, yes, that would be lovely,_ he says, perfectly polite as Mrs Figg turns off the television.

They move through various social niceties at this point, and Harry feels his nerves grow, pitching, never settling. Next to Harry, standing in the doorway, his dad is watching the scene intently, as though he knows that Lupin’s up to something and he’s starting to guess what it is.

With a clean run of unbroken small talk, Lupin ends up relaxing into Mrs Figg’s seat on the sofa, entirely by accident, Harry assumes not. She’s left to perch on the armchair – cats dislodged – looking distinctly ill-at-ease with her teacup and saucer.

Then, with a bright jolt of sound, the telephone on the table by the sofa starts ringing. There’s another in the kitchen, and maybe one upstairs. Harry flinches, because he’s forgotten what it’s like to live in a house with a phone. Neither Lupin nor Mrs Figg jumps, but they both turn to glance at the noise.

 _Don’t mind me,_ Lupin says, standing up, setting his tea to one side. He doesn’t leave the room, no matter that Harry’s expecting it. He wanders over to the window, looking out into the garden as though these are the manners he’s been taught. He makes James snort.

Watching him. Mrs Figg bites her lip as though she doesn’t know whether or not to make a fuss. She’s been told to keep constant vigilance, Harry imagines, but it’s been several years now, it must have been, since anything’s happened.

The telephone rings again and Mrs Figg makes a decision, answering the handset in the living room, on her feet, faced away from Lupin at the window. _Mrs Arabella Figg speaking,_ she says in a snooty telephone voice.

Looking out into Wisteria Walk, Lupin idly buffs his nails against the palm of his other hand. He’s listening in. Harry’s not sure if it’s supposed to be obvious. _Hello Mrs Figg,_ a sharp woman’s voice cuts through the living room, quite audible, and Harry doesn’t think that it’s because this is a memory.

The sound of this voice makes Harry’s insides shrivel tight. He glances at James, who is looking at the handset, surprised, and Harry thinks that he recognises the voice as well as Harry does.

 _Petunia Dursley here,_ the voice goes on. _I’m calling to see if you might take the boy today?_

For some reason, this makes Harry laugh. _The boy._ It’s so petty. “It was the same every year,” he tells James when he looks at him. “Aunt Petunia never gave Mrs Figg any notice.”

“The same every year?” James says sceptically, glancing at Lupin over by the window.

“What?” Harry asks, looking too. There’s no way that James is suggesting… The amount of patience it would take, to work out the pattern; the intuition, to know where to start –

But Lupin looks intent, staring out of the window. It’s as though there’s a plan, and it makes Harry’s stomach twist up entirely into a knot. He bites down on his teeth.

Mrs Figg has her head ducked, as though she wishes that she’d taken this call in the kitchen. _I… Yes, that’s fine,_ she says into the receiver, a little faintly. _What time were you…?_

_I can bring him over now, if it’s not inconvenient?_

Plainly, Mrs Figg is torn. She glances over her shoulder at Lupin, his unthreatening outfit of beige trousers and a loose-fitting shirt. She’s considering the coincidence, Harry thinks, because she’s not actually stupid.

 _Yes,_ she seems to find herself saying. _I have a guest, but I don’t expect that he’ll be staying…_

Aunt Petunia doesn’t listen to this. She rings off with a perfunctory thank you and goodbye.

As Mrs Figg puts down the telephone, the tension in the room becomes palpable. _One of my neighbours,_ she tells Lupin breezily, her cheer entirely false. _She’s bringing round her… So if you’ll… I’m afraid – I’m afraid that we’ll have to catch up another time._

Lupin has turned from the window to face her, his grin not meeting his eyes. _It’s taken me five years, Arabella,_ he says genially, and Harry bristles.

This can’t be real, Harry thinks. It doesn’t make sense. Not unless Mrs Figg throws Lupin out in the next five minutes. There’s no way that he wouldn’t remember; there’s no way that Lupin wouldn’t have _told_ him.

Everything in the letters… Sirius loved Harry, and he wanted Lupin to love him too. That’s all it ever was.

 _I know that Moody’s the Secret Keeper,_ Lupin is saying, and no one’s said Harry’s name yet, Harry supposes. _I know that you moved here in January of 82. I’ve written to Dumbledore dozens of times…_ he pauses, breathing out. His tone is entirely calm and entirely bitter, and Harry thought that he’d only ever sounded like this after Sirius died.

Looking to his right, Harry doesn’t know what to think. James is frowning, frustratingly, as though he hasn’t quite caught on. “Moony told Sirius that he forced Dumbledore’s hand,” is all that he says. “In 86.”

At some point, Harry realises, James must have convinced Sirius to reveal what Lupin told him about his life in the eighties, and that’s a feat in itself, on its own. Letting Sirius lie to him may well have been part of the strategy. Harry’s not sure what all the gossiping was.

 _He’s vulnerable when he isn’t with his aunt,_ Mrs Figg is insisting, stepping backwards and looking out into the hallway. Her back is straight, and Harry thinks that she might have been sorted into Gryffindor, once upon a time, if she’d been given the chance to be sorted. She’ll be thinking clearly in this moment, and she’ll be thinking that she hasn’t asked Lupin a security question. _Snowy!_ she calls tremulously, but it’s only because of her nerves, like Hermione’s voice would be. _Remus,_ she says, not quite looking at the man. _You’ll have to leave now._

More like a dog than a cat, or a tiger, Harry thinks, a hulking white beast of a kneazle comes slinking dangerously into the living room.

“Bloody Merlin above,” James swears, swerving away, quite possibly afraid of cats.

This must be Snowy, Harry thinks: the cat slyly saunters to brush by Mrs Figg’s ankles.

 _I don’t mean him any harm,_ Lupin swears, his tone almost mild but all of his demeanour blazing with frustration. He presses the back of his hand to his mouth, and this makes Harry think of Draco.

The ginger and tabby cats from before are circling near to Snowy’s side. The white kneazle meows, and another tabby comes in from the hall. Making Harry jump, a black-and-white patched thing comes leaping down from a cabinet in a clatter of claws – then to the mantelpiece to the television to the carpet, the sound ominous in the silence.

Together, the swarm of cats moves into formation, Snowy yawning out some sort of command. They’re joined by a calico, menacing.

“What the fuck is this?” James demands, incredulous.

There’s another cat coming in from the hallway, then another. In the meantime, however, there’s a fluffy black kneazle-cross sitting on the back of the sofa and watching, not making a move.

 _That’s Lily’s cat,_ Lupin says, nodding at Mildred, now sounding desperate to Harry’s ears. He’s not breaking eye contact with Mrs Figg. _She’s known him since he was nothing. She’d skin me alive if I had any ill-intent._

 _She wouldn’t,_ Mrs Figg contradicts. _She has a very lazy manner._

“Hark at you!” James declares loyally, but Harry can’t think about him.

 _I cannot believe that I’m doing this,_ Lupin mutters to himself, exasperated as he directly addresses the cat. _Mildred, please explain it to her. I’m a friend._

 _She’s only half kneazle,_ Mrs Figg begins, sounding equally exasperated, just in this moment. _She can’t…_

And then Mildred meows, stalking down the sofa to sweep the length of her body and her tail around one of Remus’s legs.

 _Well, look at that,_ Remus laughs at himself, ducking to stroke the cat once, firmly and cleanly while her tail lashes quick. He sounds for a moment oddly hopeful. _Something in this ruddy world remembers._

Something lurches in Harry’s chest, too desperate, just as Mrs Figg’s expression softens, relenting.

“Oh Moony,” James is breathing, and his expression is distraught. He twitches his glasses up his face, like a tic.

And – that’s who this man is, Harry thinks. Not Professor Lupin. Not yet. Not Romulus Lupin from the papers. He’s Uncle Moony, still trying.

 _I only want to say hello,_ Uncle Moony tells Mrs Figg, forcibly reasonable, rising to his feet. His eyes are burning. _I know that it’s too late to…_ He cracks a short, ironic grin. _My landlords are selling up, so technically I’m homeless – you’re not looking for a lodger, are you?_

The gall of this suggestion breaks the ice, even as it makes Harry’s eyes sting. Mrs Figg huffs a laugh, her shoulders moving. _Dumbledore would have my head!_ she points out, sounding scandalised and touching a hand to her cheek, surrounded by cats. _Whatever would I say to him? A lodger, indeed…_

Moony grins, and it almost seems genuine, guarded and shrewd. _A hello,_ he begs again, and Mrs Figg is clearly relenting.

“You don’t remember this?” asks Harry’s dad.

Harry can only shake his head.

 _No funny business,_ insists Mrs Figg, pointing her finger at him. The cats at her feet begin to disperse as Snowy meows and leaps up onto the sofa. _You can see him on your way out, and you won’t be acting familiar. He comes here and he has a boring time looking at cats and he goes home none the wiser that he’s special or that he’s being watched out for, understand?_

 _Perfectly,_ says Moony immediately, and there’s a glancing light in his eyes as though he’s making calculations.

And the weird thing is that for a moment Harry doesn’t think about his uncle. He thinks about Mrs Figg, who saw him several times a year for nearly all of the eighties, and every time she had to fake it, how seriously she took her job and how much she must have understood him, to make herself seem so boring. She might well hate pink wafer biscuits. They had posh ones with nuts in today.

He should go round for tea more than once a decade, Harry thinks.

Mrs Figg and Moony don’t talk before the doorbell rings a second time. Mrs Figg leaves to answer it, while Uncle Moony visibly breathes.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Harry finds himself saying, not sure where or who he is. He walks out into the hallway of his own accord, past someone in the way.

“Why doesn’t it make sense?” someone asks.

“It just _doesn’t._ ”

On the doorstep this time is a sight that Harry couldn’t have prepared himself for.

Because it’s him. It’s a teeny-tiny boy who looks like him, younger than Teddy and small, no matter that little Harry must be nearly six years old, if this is the month that Harry thinks it is, in 1986, like his dad said.

Without a thought, Harry moves closer to get a better look, pulling off his glasses to clean them.

The boy is looking down. The top of his head is a mop of black matted hair, greasier than Harry lets it become. He’s dressed in faded blue soft trousers with jolly patches at the pocket of a boat and a sun, maybe Dudley’s from when he was three or four. They’re elasticated at the ankle and waist, an overly large frog-green t-shirt tucked into them. They’re too short: they show his socks, which don’t match.

A few seconds after the door opens, the boy looks up, lost in his own world. The green of the t-shirt plays off his wide, childish eyes, which are bright, bright green. Harry sees Lily Potter when he looks at them, glasses back on his face.

The boy has clearly not yet been taken to get his own glasses. He doesn’t look cared for.

It was instinct, Harry thinks, the first time that he considered Draco Malfoy’s innocence.

“Did Vernon lose his job?” a voice asks behind him, sounding confused.

“What?” Harry asks back, not sure what’s going on.

There’s another version of himself there behind him. It’s the little boy’s dad, whose eyes are narrowing, meeting Harry’s for a moment, vivid and shrewd and too warm, before he looks at his son. They look right together: a thirty-year-old man and a child nearly six. Give the child a wash, and they’re each other’s spitting image.

And yet Harry feels his own urge to intervene, looking at the child, to protect him from any further harm. He really does need a wash, he keeps thinking, moving forward, and he reaches out a hand to guide him safely into the house, before he remembers that nothing here is solid. His hand passes through and bounces off his own hair.

As a child, Harry is scratching roughly at the crown of his head, and Harry hopes that he doesn’t have lice. _Hullo Mrs Figg,_ he says, his voice lilting and resigned and laden with irony. He’s looking down at his shoes again before the words are finished, wiping his nose and sniffing thickly.

He has a thicker South London accent than Harry remembers having, and certainly stronger than any of the Dursleys’. He supposes that the boy must have picked it up from school, from speaking there more often than he ever used to speak at home. Maybe from the teacher, because he never had friends.

 _Thanks for taking me at short notice,_ the boy continues as if by rote, the words awkward as he says them – _no-TISS_. Words don’t seem natural to him, self-expression.

 _That’s quite all right,_ says Mrs Figg anyway, offering a visibly forced, dotty grin. She used to call him Harry, Harry thinks he remembers. She must not be able to in Lupin’s presence, because of the secret.

In any case, the boy sighs, climbing in past her through the doorway.

 _Sometimes things crop up unexpectedly,_ Mrs Figg is going on.

 _Yeah,_ tiny Harry agrees, sounding older than six. Intelligent. Much quicker than Harry thinks of himself being. _Like Duddy’s birthday._

After a moment, Harry realises that the tiny version of him has made a joke.

There’s a sound of a snort, a guffaw that’s not from the memory, and it’s from his dad, Harry realises, glancing at him.

The man looks impossibly fond, not put off at all, holding his nose, and Harry has to look away, feeling hot and embarrassed, unreal. His hand keeps reaching to let him check the child’s health, the state of his eyes and his teeth, his weight and any bumps and bruises.

 _I’ve been having an old friend round for tea,_ Mrs Figg says as little Harry dutifully takes off his shoes, wrenching at Velcro efficiently.

For a moment, Harry forgets who she means, and he thinks that she means him.

Mildred the cat appears from the living room at this moment, circling and keen to climb all over little Harry’s hands and feet, meowing and pushing between his legs, checking him over.

The boy is wrinkling his nose and glaring balefully at her, pushing her away, his expression faintly shrewish.

“Oh no, no,” Harry finds himself tutting. “That’s your mum’s cat,” he tells himself, his voice coming out the way that he used to sound around Teddy. “She’s a lovely cat, here to see you,” he keeps going. “She won’t like you shoving her, will she? We don’t –”

He cuts himself off, feeling stupid, embarrassed, out of control.

“You did a lot worse as a baby,” someone’s saying, strangely careful – it’s the boy’s dad, sniffing brightly as he lets his nose go.

 _He’s a busy day ahead,_ Mrs Figg continues in the memory, talking about tiny Harry’s Uncle Moony, Harry suddenly remembers, and it makes him laugh in panic. _I’m afraid that he’s just about to…_

 _Hello there,_ comes Moony’s voice, then, softly, cutting straight through Arabella’s tone with sheer earnestness.

Harry turns, and he’s sure that the boy looks up too.

Mildred meows.

 _Mrs Figg has told me all about you,_ the man is saying, and he looks impossibly young.

He’s standing in the doorway to the living room, Moony, arms crossed over the front of his sludgy beige-green shirt. His eyes are bright amber in colour, and Harry doesn’t know why he couldn’t ever have remembered meeting him.

Because he doesn’t – does he?

Memory is so tricky, sometimes, Harry thinks – it almost feels as though he does, seeing it happen. He remembers being the boy, so he must remember part of this. He feels desperate, horrid longing.

Little Harry has finally freed himself from his knackered old trainers, when Harry looks back. There’s only one big toe poking out of a sock, which isn’t too bad. He’s still crouched to the ground, and Mildred the cat is butting her head into his hand, huge like a panther next to the boy’s small form.

He looks up, he looks down; he does a double take, little Harry, even as he gives in and strokes the cat, almost absently, clutching soft fur with rough fingers. _You’re not an old friend,_ he tells his uncle, affronted, stressing _old_. He’s standing up, hiking his legs in a high marching step as Mildred gets bored of being stroked.

It makes Moony laugh, and the boy’s dad makes a noise, even as Harry himself feels utterly mortified. He can’t look away from Moony’s expression, the edge of emotion in his eyes and his voice, all too subtle for a child to read. He can’t look away from tiny Harry’s oblivious candour.

 _I dare say that I am rather old,_ Moony corrects, self-deprecating, his expression gleaming with a joke. His arms are forcibly crossed over his chest, his grip on his upper arms tight as though he’d like to reach out. _About as old as your parents, I imagine._

On the periphery of Harry’s vision, Mrs Figg flinches, but she doesn’t interrupt.

Little Harry scowls. _I ain’t got any parents,_ he states plainly, cutting like a knife, and Harry winces, rubbing at his eyes under his glasses, so embarrassed… _She can’t have told you much if she didn’t tell you that._

 _Everyone has parents,_ Moony tells the boy, arms crossed, looming from a great height and talking in aphorisms. He seems to find the words difficult. _I’m sure that yours are very proud of you, wherever they are._

Harry’s certain that this situation is terribly funny. It’s funny, isn’t it? To think of this moment, five years in the making for Moony, when Harry doesn’t remember it, twenty years later. The fact that Moony’s here now, making every effort, when in twenty years’ time he’s given up and run away. The fact that at this moment in time Sirius is losing his mind in Azkaban and in another ten years he’ll be dead, or else lost.

 _I doubt it,_ little Harry is telling his Uncle Moony harshly, guileless as he stares up at this stranger, his eyes as bright green as his mum’s. _Uncle Vernon says they were drunks who drove themselves into a ditch._

Flinching, it’s the tone that makes Harry recoil, as though this is true, must be true, and there’s nothing to be thought about it but _good riddance_.

He’s so _small_.

“Dad,” Harry finds himself coming out with, staring at himself. “Dad, I used to tell Uncle Vernon to stuff it,” he promises, because that’s how it happened.

Dad doesn’t reply.

 _Uncle Vernon isn’t your parents’ son,_ Moony corrects in the memory, and Harry can’t believe it, how he manages to sound reproving and kind at the same time (“A poor way to repay them – gambling their sacrifice…”). _They’ve only you left. Who will speak for them, if not you?_

Little Harry seems puzzled by this argument, frowning and opening his mouth before closing it, and Harry’s chest burns.

And that’s all it is, before Mrs Figg brings the conversation to a close. _Yes, yes, busy, busy, trains to catch, people to see…_ She’s aggressively cheerful, clearly avoiding the use of Moony’s name. Then Moony is being bustled off through the door with barely a –

 _Yes, yes… Goodbye, then._ He never says the boy’s name.

_Bye._

– and the memory is coming to an end.

The world shifts, and they’re returned to Draco’s office, all the books and the large, dark desk.

Waiting for them, there’s Draco with his wand in his hand. “What the _hell_ are you doing in here?” he asks coldly.

The canary flutters around its cage.

“Draco,” Harry tells him, meeting his eyes and trying to explain, before he’s looking at James and he sees it, how angry the man is, how upset

(“Uncle Vernon says…”).

Hazel eyes touch on Harry’s for a moment, hard and piercing. They look at him, they look straight through him to somewhere that Harry’s never wanted anyone to see, and then James is lurching off towards the doorway, making Draco step back out of the way.

It’s the tone, Harry thinks, that’s done this. The tone with which Harry says everything; the tone with which he must have shouted at Remus, all those years ago. The tone with which he shouts everything, because he’s –

Draco’s eyes are suspicious when he turns them on Harry. “Harry, what –” he demands, not able to keep up a temper.

“He needs to cool down,” Harry tells him, unable to think it through. He’s filled with too many emotions – to know that he was once wanted; to see how little he deserved… “He can’t go far, can he? It’ll be best –”

Oh no, he thinks, his stomach twisting over itself. No, that’s not true at all. Because magic is real and they’re _wizards_.

He runs out onto the landing, which is cheery enough with its dark wooden doors – Hermione’s office and the staff room, all the stairs. Only Harry can’t see his dad, and he can’t remember the way to the lift, if it’s up or down. His dad can move silently, if needs be, just like Harry can.

“Draco, we need to go,” Harry changes his mind, turning around, and Draco’s looking at him, distrustful. Harry couldn’t count how many days it’s been since their row. Are they arguing? There’s always something, but he feels it, the crocheted strands of whatever it is binding them together. “Please,” he begs, and there’s a heady touch of panic in his voice. “I know where he’s going.” He doesn’t want to go there on his own.

Yet he knows where Ron would go, if in some other world his daughter told Harry those things. If his daughter ever looked so unloved. He’s less quick to anger, Ron, these days, but that’s only mature self-control.

Harry knows Ron. He’ll always know Ron.

“We can go to the atrium,” Draco is saying, frowning, reading Harry’s face.

“Is that the only way out?” Harry asks, starting to jitter. “His dad was an auror.” It must have been something like that. Avalorne had her own lift. “He might know –”

“Your grandfather wasn’t an auror,” Draco says, and it’s entirely irrelevant. He looks confused, as though Harry should have known this, and Harry doesn’t know anything, who Draco is to talk to him so kindly. “Fleamont Potter was a renowned potioneer. He consulted for Alastor Moody after the employment and promotion channels –”

“Whatever!” Harry interrupts, desperately ignoring the need to know this story. A _potioneer?_ “Will he be going to the atrium?”

“I have no idea,” Draco says plainly, aimlessly holding his lovely hawthorn wand. “I only ever apparate.”

They look at each other, and Harry begs.

There’s a tick in Draco’s jaw and he’s choosing priorities, Harry thinks. He’s good at that. “Can you get out as well as you can get in?” he demands. “You say that you know where he’s going.”

That was always the plan and Harry’s sure that it will be fine. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah,” he repeats.

Draco holds out his hand, imperious, and Harry pulls his wand before he clasps it in his left. He wants to go back to the flat, immediately, right now, but he musters his three Ds with punishing control and he slashes his wand, pulling them round into nothing.

With a _crack_ they land in the quiet midnight of Little Whinging’s Privet Drive, directly on the pavement in front of number 4. The air of the first of September is cool, the sky still very dark. A security light comes on, flaring at them, bold.

Harry doesn’t want to be here.

“Where –?” Draco begins, looking around, but he’s quick. “Is this where –?”

Harry hasn’t been back here in eleven years. He’s not surprised that everything looks exactly the same. It feels odd to be standing here with Draco, almost as if he’s in another pensieve and all of this is a memory. He doesn’t let go of his hand, because that’s a better feeling than it could be. He has a desperate urge to hide him: if any of the curtain-twitchers see him with Harry, there’s no way that they won’t know.

Seconds later – or at least soon enough that Harry can’t get his bearings – his dad appears, and this is stranger; it’s worse. He’s a couple of houses further down, outside number 8, but he’s here, and he must have been to Privet Drive before in his life, which doesn’t make sense. His feet will have trodden the carpet on which Harry crawled.

A set of security lights flashes harsh from number 8, then number 6, and Harry’s dad is a figure like Harry’s reflection, too angry, too young.

Suspense in his stomach, Harry feels like he’s flying straight towards the ground and his body’s been bound, his broom jinxed. He won’t be able to to pull up. _This_ is what he didn’t want his dad to see.

“Dad, you don’t want to do this,” Harry manages, approaching him, letting go of Draco’s hand, and he feels like an idiot, because this is an idiotic thing to say. “It doesn’t matter,” he tries again. Because it doesn’t; he can believe that.

His dad ignores him, wand in hand as he hikes a leg straight over the low garden wall at the end of the Dursleys’ lawn and into the flowerbed, presumably, before striding heavily towards the door. He’s slammed a thumb against the doorbell before Harry can react.

“Oh, I see,” Draco says. “Yes, this is a terrible idea.” Harry’s not even sure what Draco’s doing here, besides catching them.

Again before Harry can make himself move, Harry’s dad slams his thumb on the bell. A light comes on in the hallway. _“I’m armed!”_ comes Uncle Vernon’s voice, growling.

It makes Harry laugh, which is entirely inappropriate. Armed with _what?_ he wants to ask.

At the sound of Vernon’s growl, Harry’s dad’s expression is hewn rock. He steps back adroitly, and he mutters to himself, not sounding like Sirius but maybe like somebody else. “Doesn’t fucking count if it doesn’t fucking hit him in the face.” And then he blasts the front door inwards, where it turns and collapses off its hinges.

Aunt Petunia screams, Draco flinches, and Harry’s running.

“Hello Vernon,” says Harry’s dad, crossing the threshold. He puts his wand away. “Remember me? It’s James Potter.”

In the hallway, Uncle Vernon is pale and huge and wrapped in a voluminous brown dressing gown. His moustache is entirely grey and he looks almost deflated from his shape in Harry’s memory, like a day-old balloon. He is not armed. Aunt Petunia is on the stairs in pale purple, somehow more waspish and thin.

And –

“You’ll be glad to know that I take a stand on hexing muggles,” Harry’s dad is saying, unlike anyone who’s ever come into this house, and Harry feels terrified by how much he loves him. It’s not a feeling which ends well.

His feet are crunched in the front door’s glass.

“Get out of my house!” Uncle Vernon instructs in the tone that he gets.

“ _Dad._ ” Harry wants to protect him. Aunt Petunia makes a sound of outrage, and that’s dangerous. “Dad, let’s go, it’s not –”

In a surprising fit of gallantry, Uncle Vernon comes charging at Harry’s dad like a rhinoceros. Harry winces, retreating as his dad punches the physically much older man in the face and knees him in the stomach and pushes him into the stairs, making Aunt Petunia shriek, the violence and strength of what happens vivid and hard.

Stumbling and heavy, Vernon falls to a knee by the cupboard door. It’s had a new coat of paint, maybe two, it must have done, but the door remains brilliant white gloss. It’s pity Harry feels, he thinks, for everything that used to live in there. It’s loss. He imagines the spiders, his old friends, their webs dusted away and their legs broken off between the rim of a glass and a newspaper, never welcome in the house. He used to imagine himself escaping with them, his life a suspended moment inside a giant’s old glass of water, waiting for freedom, the sky and the grass and the road.

It’s a small cupboard, really. Much smaller than his shed. He was very small when he was six.

“ _That_ is for calling Lily a drunk,” Harry’s dad is saying, and it seems disproportionate. This violence – for something so long ago.

Harry’s lost somewhere unreal, a lucid dream which could easily become a nightmare. He tries anyway, moving forward to be brushed off, shouldered back. “All right, Dad –”

“Are you going to stand up and explain yourself?” Harry’s dad commands, his voice building, powerful, his hands in fists. “And _you_ –” He looks up to Petunia, whose eyes are wide with terror.

“Dad, stop it,” Harry tells him more solidly, moving to pull on his arm, yanking him backwards as Petunia whimpers. She’s only slight and powerless, really. His dad will feel awful in the morning if he intimidates her. “Draco, get his wand,” he insists, and for a moment he fears that Draco is going to do something other than cast _Expelliarmus_.

He doesn’t. Harry’s dad’s punching arm is wrenched back and his mahogany wand strips loose past Harry to clatter somewhere behind him. As his dad is unbalanced, Harry’s able to pull him out of the house, feet over ankles down the step and onto the lawn, making a mess.

“Let go of me,” his dad is complaining, struggling against Harry’s grip. His anger isn’t fizzling out; it’s only growing, more entrenched the longer they’re here. “Don’t think that I won’t fucking find out,” he calls into the house. “ _Everything_ you’ve done.”

“Grimmo,” Harry yells at Draco, into the night, the bright artificial light which flares again, burns his eyes, his own wand still in his hand. “The drawing room,” he adds, just in case there’s a row. “I’ll meet you.”

His dad is struggling and suddenly he lurches, pulling Harry forwards. “Everything you’ve done, Vernon, you fucking _cunt,_ ” he promises, the word violently aimed at the doorway.

Harry flinches, and it all goes haywire from here.

“You _disgust_ me,” shouts Harry’s dad, surging forward, pulling at his empty sleeve. “I am _ashamed_ to call you my family; how _dare_ you –?”

“What _are_ you?” screeches Aunt Petunia from inside the house. “Where have you –?”

Jittering, Harry tries to get a grip on his dad’s shoulder again. “I’ll explain things to Dudley,” he says quickly, forgetting that he should keep his mouth shut. He doesn’t even plan on explaining to Dudley. He might mention it to Luna.

“You –?” Aunt Petunia seems to find enough of herself to push forward, onto the doorstep. “You wicked child,” she spits, the way that she used to spit a lot of things, and it makes Harry flinch again. “What have you done? What is it?”

Solid and commanding, Harry’s dad’s pushes himself into the space between them. “How dare you talk to my son –”

“Your _son_ –” Aunt Petunia turns on him.

“You will rue the day –”

“Your filthy little son –”

His tone turns dark. “Do you know what I can do to you?”

Heart wild, “Dad, _no_ ,” Harry swears, pulling the man back onto the lawn by his elbows, strain in his arms. He can’t bear the thought (“I take a stand…”).

“I will make your eyes bleed from their sockets –”

“I'd like to see you try –”

“ _No._ ”

“Every lie you have ever told –”

“You killed my sister!”

“Draco, the drawing room,” Harry commands, dwelling on his own determination. He has no idea where Draco is.

“Harr–” Draco shouts suddenly, the sound choked, but it isn’t much help.

“You fucking bitch, he was our _child_ –”

James has a hold on Harry’s fingers and on his wand, his grip painful, and Harry’s startled, pulling back. Harry sees hazel eyes, vivid and angry, and they’re struggling on the grass, pain in Harry's fingers, hand and wrist; he’s stumbling over his feet. The security light is a flash, bright again. For the first time in years, Harry feels the connection between himself and his phoenix wand, resisting; he’s distracted by the thought that they’re ruining the lawn.

“You will be _nothing_ ,” now Harry’s dad is swearing over Harry’s shoulder, the weight of him heavy and violent, pushing forward, his face all tense muscle, bright, his hand hard and hot on Harry’s fingers, crushing. “When I’m through with you –”

The wand is coming free from his hand, and Harry doesn’t want to snap it, not again – and yet he feels it with everything inside him: _No, I need this._

Because it chose him, didn’t it, this wand? It was in that moment the one thing in the world he belonged to. It was his to protect himself with, to protect everyone else, his love and all his need to be loved. It was the promise of magic, which would fix all his ills.

It was a lie, he knows now. A half-truth. But it’s a powerful bond, that formed between a phoenix wand and its bearer.

For a long, certain instant, Harry gets the upper hand, wrenching his wrist free, grabbing his dad’s elbow. He moves to disapparate, swishing his stick of holly even as a shoulder slams into his, hard and shocking. The world turns, and he sees the drawing room appear around them –

– and then a hand takes hold of Harry’s wand again.

It’s his _dad_. Harry needs to protect him. From himself, from his own urge to chivalry, from caring, from _seeing_ –

Harry’s never thought of himself protecting his dad, all the times that he’s shouted at him. It can’t have been that, to begin with, all the time, can it?

There’s a _pop_ of apparition, somewhere.

Burning, the holly grain is pulling across Harry’s palm, and he cries out, even as he and his dad stumble and slam into the sideboard, rattling the mirrors above it. The wand pulls free, his leg is burning with pain, and Harry shouts, “ _No._ ”

It’s not possessive, the feeling Harry feels. It’s the feeling of being possessed, and it’s like a chimaera wrenching on his chest, on his hands, through his fingers –

Harry feels it like fire, whatever it is, and his phoenix wand promptly burns, igniting, and Harry’s been told that wands can do that. Right there in front of Harry’s eyes, with the force of Harry’s need for his wand, flames engulf his father’s hand and then billow to take his arm and his torso, all of him in a red-orange-gold burst of flame, a howl of rushing air.

The world stops. Flames crackle.

Another rush of air. A cry escapes from Harry like a wound. The phoenix wand darts to Harry’s hand, unmarked and unharmed – but instead of feeling complete he feels only loss as his fingers tighten around it. “Dad?” He reaches, stumbling forwards as the flames stumble backwards. “ _Dad!_ ”

Vivid eyes are staring at Harry, surprised, and there’s the crackle of burning robes, a hundred flames. The heat is unbearable and Harry’s face feels burnt.

What has he done?

“On the ground!” Harry shouts, the sound deep in his chest. He remembers _Stop, Drop and Roll_ from primary school. He doesn’t know the right spell; he doesn’t dare it. _Aguamenti?_ He’s only wearing jeans and a t-shirt, rather than useful smothering robes, but he forces himself closer, into the heat which is crisp on his arms and his hands and his face and he thinks –

He’s thrown backwards to the floorboards, urgently and hard, right to his backside and his spine and his shoulders and his head, which cracks on the leg of the sideboard.

He lies there dazed for a second, all over himself, hearing flames.

“ _No!_ ”

Like a dream, as Harry rolls to sitting, the room’s huge Turkish rug is whipping free from under its furniture, the Chesterfield sofas complaining and slamming with the coffee table onto the floorboards.

The rug flashes down over Harry’s father, wrapping and pressing, marking out the shape of a man, who seems to have been thrown down too. A flood of water sweeps over the rug in a rippling, heavy wave. It crests into foam, crashes transfigured into earth, and a man is buried under the clod.

The silence is deafening.

The earth scatters into air and the rug pulls away. There’s no smoke. It’s as though the other elements have taken it with the fire, with the heat. Harry rolls to his knees and lumbers forward. It’s difficult; everything hurts.

He’s not sure what he’s looking at and he’s not sure what he can touch. He touches black robes streaked with white and they crumble in his fingers. “Dad; Dad, please…” He can’t see, his eyes blurring. There’s a harsh sound, wheezing and whistling, and it might be his dad or it might just be him. His own voice doesn’t feel loud enough; it feels like it’s tearing at his throat. He needs someone to hear him. He breathes, the sound hooping. “Dad, please don’t go,” he begs anyone, covering his mouth with his hand, his whole face burning; his eyes. “Please don’t go; please don’t go…”

Harry can’t hear anything, and his head is full of Dobby, of Dumbledore on the lawn, but then there’s shouting, a voice loud and breaking through the cacophony. “What the fuck is going on?”

There’s a croak as though someone doesn’t know how to speak –

“Get Lily. _KREACHER –_ ” the voice bellows, and there’s the sound of apparition. “The WASPs. _Now._ ”

Another sharp _crack_.

A presence falls by Harry’s side, heavy and warm, a hand in his hair that takes his skull by the back of it. Harry feels cool there, and it might well be bleeding – but Harry doesn’t deserve to be touched, not so gently. He doesn’t deserve to be forgiven.

“I’m sorry,” Harry promises, unable to see anything.

“It’s all right,” promises a ghost, holding his hand where it’s shaking, brushing against burnt fabric. “It’s all right, Harry; he’s breathing; you can see it. Look at him.”

But Harry can’t see it. He shuts his eyes and ducks his chin to his chest, desperate to scream, twill turning to dust.

An arm takes him around the shoulders, pulling him close. A hand takes hold of his and contains it. The voice is murmuring to someone else, even as Harry’s breath hitches, wet. Harry can’t make sense of it. Because this is what happens, every time he lets himself care, every time anyone sees. This is what he does, without trying, without thinking, by instinct.


	12. An adventure, part 1

Ginny’s wedding made headlines. It took place at the Hogsmeade Grand – the oldest hotel outside the village, once the residence of a Hufflepuff descendant. Everything was classic in design. Picturesque.

Both Percy and George were married in the Burrow’s back garden, like Bill, so it made a change to go elsewhere. Matías had a large family to accommodate, so the hotel made a lot of sense: there were four older sisters by Harry’s count, all married with children; at least ten aunts and uncles, who had children and grandchildren too.

The ceremony was sweet and the reception was riotous, deafening. Harry kept a smile on his face, and he sat with Ron for the first bit, with Hermione, who hadn’t quite made the cut for one of the bridesmaids (who were Luna and a Harpy and someone from Puds U). Angelina, Fleur and Audrey hadn’t made the cut either, Hermione pointed out, though Victoire directed her brother and Percy’s two eldest ahead of Ginny’s arrival. Percy’s three-year-old, Marilynn, got excited when Ginny reached the front and made the ceiling rain with glittery bits of tinsel.

It made everyone laugh and go _aww_ , and it could have been planned, though it wasn’t. Catching the pause, George looked down the row to meet their eyes and joke, “She’s really one of mine.” Ron guffawed. Audrey thwapped him from the row behind with her programme, clipping Harry’s ear.

Draco hadn’t been invited, and Harry shouldn’t have been surprised. They hadn’t been talking back in February, when the invitations had been sent, and Harry had RSVPed without any tick for a guest. The allowance to bring a plus-one combined with Draco’s lack of invitation might have been intended to force Harry into action, but Harry hadn’t realised at the time.

Instead, Harry had made an assumption, and Draco had done nothing to relieve him of it. Confronting reality that morning – leaving Draco behind after what had been a heated conversation, not a row – had put Harry in a horrible mood, with no one to blame but himself.

By the time that the ceremony was finished, Harry was both in a horrible mood and starting to feel a bit bored. Fidgety. He’d been to a few of these things now, and they were always the same. By the time that the breakfast was done and the band was starting up, Harry was down several glasses of fairy wine, sitting with Neville and Luna and Liz, two tables from the top. He should have recognised that he was on the edge of misbehaving, but Ron and Hermione were sitting with the rest of the bride’s family.

“Cheer up, Harry,” Luna told him as he poured himself another glass of dark amber, which was ever refilling its jug. It was as though she knew how he felt. Almost as though she was bored herself, though boredom’s not a feeling Luna feels, as much as Harry’s aware. “Draco’s having a lovely time.”

It didn’t help to be reminded how poorly he understood his boyfriend’s emotions.

“Just think, Haz, that could have been you,” Neville joked to liven up the proceedings, nodding towards the couple on the dancefloor. They were laughing their way through the first dance; a photographer was taking a picture.

It was easy to imagine how it would look on the newsstands. Matías was every bit the handsome quidditch player, upright and solid, while Ginny herself looked like fire, her make-up all ashes and smoke, her robes a mixture of fitted and loose, swirling silver-white chiffon, skewed glimpses of skin. It was a modern style of robemaking, the cutting edge of fashion, tasteful yet enticing.

Harry found himself turning to Neville without any instinct to hold his tongue. “Should’ve been you, mate,” he said darkly, half-joking, not really thinking about it.

Neville started, his eyes drawn from Ginny, and he shrank into himself.

“But you decided to keep _waiting_ ,” Harry sneered, holding his eyes, “for someone to tell you it’s fine.”

Their whole group went quiet. Abruptly, Liz turned and struck up conversation with the other old Harpies on her left.

“Are you talking to Neville, Harry?” Luna asked him over the tablecloth, unimpressed. “It doesn’t sound like you are. You and Neville are good friends.”

Looking between them, Neville couldn’t seem to believe that both of them knew, which Harry thought was desperately naïve. “How was I supposed to –”

“Don’t sit here and tell me and _Luna_ –” Harry began, quite happy to play the card if it won him this point.

It was clear, nonetheless, that Luna disagreed. “Don’t use my name like that, please.” Her blue eyes were dreamy and wide, damning. She was wearing her bridesmaid robes, oddly pretty, her hair glossy and full around her shoulders. With professional make-up it made her look placid and uninteresting, most likely straight, and that pissed Harry off for some reason. “This is an important day for all of us. Ginny was my first love too, you know,” she said sagely, pushing a finger up her nose.

Now, Draco could say what he liked about Luna never lying, hating lies and everything else, but Harry was certain that she was making this up. Full of wine, Harry let himself laugh, the sound full and mocking as it bubbled from his throat.

Luna looked at him, testing, and he’d be getting it in the neck, Harry knew – but he’d been getting it in the neck from Luna for years. The way he’d slept around after school; the way he’d told Dudley to do one; the way he’d let Draco pretend that he didn’t live in the house… She acted as though he didn’t enjoy it, his life as it had become.

And then –

“Fuck you, Harry,” Neville said, ruffled, on his feet, colour high in his cheeks. He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He’d never tried this before, kicking off; it was all of it new. “I’m worth twelve of you!” he came out with, before storming away.

Watching him go, Harry had the odd urge to tut and call him dear, because Neville clearly didn’t mean it. The line didn’t quite sound like Malfoy in his head.

“He’s going to forgive you,” Luna told Harry.

“No he won’t,” Harry told her, picking up his wine.

Later, Harry remembers feeling even more bored, leaning on the bar and asking the man from the caterers, “What d’you drink when you know you can’t leave without making a scene?” He’d already grinned for a photograph and done a quote, but there were likely still gossips here. They’d asked about Ginny; he was in need of a pick-me-up.

The answer was Jägermeister, which was on Harry’s internal list of banned substances. It was one of Ginny’s favourites. He had two doubles, one after the other, and they made him feel like he was walking through a forest.

The next thing that Harry remembers, he was talking to Matías in a corner of the ball room. They were by the glass doors which led to the corridor with the loos. He was embarrassing himself.

“… The thing is with me and Ginny,” he was saying. “We were never a thing. All we did was procrastinate. She went out with Dean for months, you know, in school. We snogged _once_ ,” he insisted, holding up a finger.

Matías was nodding at him, frowning manfully like an epic hero. He likely knew about the time in 2006, but he didn't bring it up.

“The first time I kissed her, I reckon I got spit all over her face. You need practice before you go around…”

A tut came out of Harry’s mouth, and he looked to the doors, the corridor’s tunnel.

“The bi thing,” Harry found himself going on, scowling, because this was confusing. They always asked him about it. He tended to shrug and say that he was full of love, which was a joke. “I don’t like it,” he decided now.

Matías laughed, distracting. He wasn’t interrupting.

“I could’ve had everything be decided, you know,” Harry told him. “Someone could’ve told me, _Harry, mate, here’s something that you need to know about your love life,_ but instead it’s like they think that it should all be up to me.” He sighed, looking away. “But I’m no _good_ at making choices. It’s ridiculous – on the one hand, you’ve got the whole world behind you, and on the other… If you ask me to choose between easy and difficult, I only ever choose –”

 _Horcruxes._ The word stuck in Harry’s head. He looked down at the floor, shredding fingers through his hair at the back, where it stuck up.

“I don’t see how it’s fair,” Harry interrupted himself, frowning. His dress shoes were scuffed. Matías’s gleamed. It was difficult to keep his balance. “It’s like someone put a price on him – told me I could have him, but there’s a cost, and am I _really_ sure that I want him over someone who’d be cheaper?”

Harry found himself getting wound up, pressing the fingers of one hand into his eyes. The other was holding a drink.

“I’m s’posed to accept that loving him won’t keep him safe, and what’s that?” he asked, taking a glug of it. “That’s rubbish. I hate it.”

Breathing, Harry returned to a point that he wouldn’t remember wanting to make.

“He’s lovely, that’s my point,” he decided, wiping his nose and opening his eyes. “Ginny doesn’t know, because they never talk. He keeps it all hidden. You’d like him, I promise. He’s funny and clever.”

As he came into focus, Matías’s eyebrows were raised. As Harry stumbled over his feet, he looked past Harry’s head and clapped him hard on the shoulder, leaving his warm hand there, steady enough to orbit around. “Ron, my new bro,” he shouted, sounding ineffably cool. “You’ve lost something.”

“Yeah?” Ron replied, coming over and sounding suspicious.

“Ron!” Harry shouted at him, because it was Ron. “I’m calling Ginny cheap.” His cheer sank as he realised it.

“You what, mate?” Ron asked, looking bemused. It was good of him, Harry knew, because he’d never be forgiven for messing Ginny around.

“I’m ruining the wedding,” Harry lamented, telling Ron, and somehow he spilled the rest of his martini on the floor. He wasn’t sure why he was drinking martinis.

“The man needs another drink,” Matías said promptly, looking at him with laughter in his eyes, clapping his hand again. His accent was very smooth, really, and he was very handsome. Not Harry’s type, but Harry wasn’t sure that he had one. “We’re lucky that the reporters have gone.”

Ron was frowning now. “He doesn’t need another drink,” he said clearly, plucking Harry’s glass out of his wet hand. “He needs a big glass of water.”

“I’ll leave him with you,” said Matías, shaking his head, and that was Harry off the Christmas card list, he imagined. With a slap to Harry’s back, Matías left them to cheers and shouts from a group not far away.

Ron snorted, unhappy. “Tosser,” he said as the man departed.

“ _Ron_ ,” Harry reacted, and he was struck by how much he sounded like Hermione. He managed to stumble into Ron’s side, shoving him in shoulder. “You can’t say that; that’s the _groom._ He’s your brother-in-law…”

“All my brothers are tossers,” Ron pointed out, and Harry didn’t agree. “He fits right in. What’s happened to you?”

Belatedly, Harry’s sense of shame caught up with him, curdling in his stomach. He covered his face with his hands, unable to believe what he’d been saying. He looked over to the stage, where the band wasn’t playing, though the dancefloor was full. The room in general was still full enough, but it was mostly young people left. The lights were marking out the evening; the atmosphere was everyone’s chatter and laughter, though a bassline was booming and the music would be loud, Harry imagined, nearer to the dancers.

“I only wanted to tell him that Draco could’ve come. It wouldn’t’ve mattered.” Harry focused on Ron’s face. He looked concerned. He was holding Harry’s glass and his hand was on Harry’s shoulder, though Harry couldn’t really feel it. “He’d’ve kept out of the way; you know what he’s… And it’s not _like_ that with me and Ginny,” Harry interrupted himself. “I wouldn’t’ve been trying…”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ron reassured him, wrinkling his nose and patting Harry’s shoulder, though Harry managed to trip somehow and his sinuses hurt; he needed another drink.

“D’you know what she said to me,” Harry said, looking at Ron’s arm. “After Dumbledore’s funeral, when I broke up with her? She said that she’d known it was coming and that I’d never be happy, not if I wasn’t…”

“We were teenagers, mate; I wouldn’t take anything –”

“Can you imagine Draco saying that?” Harry interrupted, and it almost made him laugh, the feeling heavy behind his eyes. “He’d’ve told me to take him to Bermuda and let the world hang.”

Ron said nothing, and Harry looked up at him, not sure how to read his expression.

“He wouldn’t’ve meant it,” Harry promised, and Ron’s blue eyes flicked to his. “He cares more about the world than he lets on. But he’d’ve _said_ it. He’d’ve let me imagine –”

Ginny likely hadn’t meant it either, Harry supposed for the first time, looking back. She always laughed things off, Ginny Weasley.

Frowning sympathetically, Ron spoke carefully. “What is it you’re sad about, Harry? You must’ve known that it was unlikely Ginny’d…” He looked around them, stepping closer so that no one would overhear, addressing his words mostly to the floor. “Don’t tell the new bloke in case she hasn’t said, but it’s obvious she still…” Ron sighed, and he’s a romantic at heart, Harry thought at the time. “She’s got feelings for you, mate,” he said simply. “Always has done. She doesn’t want to see you with him.”

“But I have feelings for me too,” Harry said nonsensically.

“I know,” Ron sympathised anyway, patting him on the shoulder.

“And Draco.”

Ron nodded, but now he was suppressing a laugh. “Yeah.”

Even as Ron complained, then, Harry pulled him into a hug, sniffing, and for a little while it was better. He was being slapped on the back and he felt protected from the world, all of its confusion.

“What’s going on over here?” Hermione’s voice then demanded, bright in the darkness, brusque and Hermione-like. “I can see hugging – why is there hugging?”

Harry pulled back, blinking into the dimness of the room. The source of light which he could see above them was harsh, somehow, but then he hugged Hermione and she was warm, her hair large and bushy and soft against his cheek.

“Oof,” she said as he let his weight fall against her. “Harry, what’s happened?”

“I’m ruining the wedding,” he said, failing to make it a joke.

“No you’re not,” she said, rubbing his back roughly. Harry imagined her checking with Ron. “You’re ruining your liver,” she accused, changing the subject. “I should have seen this coming; it’s like Christmas all over again –”

This was when they had the conversation that Harry recalled at the pub. It grew out of somewhere and moved into Hermione saying –

“It’s o _kay_ , Harry; you can express your sexuality, whatever it is.” She nodded at him, frowning and kind. “You should feel comfortable with it; we’re us.”

Ron appeared with a pint-glass of water, and Harry wasn’t sure where it had come from. “Here you go,” he said. “Get that down your neck.”

“Ron and I kiss and cuddle in front of _you_ all the time, if you haven’t noticed.”

Really, Harry tries not to notice. “It’s nice when you do it,” he lied at the wedding, drinking a glug of water, which _was_ nice. A bit weak. “You’re all neat.” This is the one saving grace.

“It’s only nice according to heteronormative society, Harry!” Hermione declared in their corner of the ball room, her eyes blazing. “A system in which we all lose! That’s not nice, is it? This _wedding_ –”

This rant went on for a while, and Harry did try to follow it. There was something about statistics, and how Hermione’d likely sublimated her feelings for Penelope Clearwater, which Harry couldn’t believe. Her taste was all sunshine and honour and forthright emotion. Blokes.

“We are your _best friends_ ,” Hermione concluded anyway. “You should feel comfortable experiencing sexual attraction in our vicinity.”

At this point, Harry looked at Ron, because he wanted to laugh.

Ron looked like he wanted to laugh too. “Sorry, mate,” he said as they shared a look. “I think I’m experiencing sexual attraction in your vicinity.”

“Well, go on, then,” Harry suggested, even though it was a bit odd, really, the idea of someone fancying Hermione. Almost as odd as someone fancying Ron.

Glancing at Hermione and then back at him, Ron’s ears were turning pink. “I can’t while you’re watching,” he said, which made Harry laugh, most likely too loudly.

Hermione, of course, only came out with, “Honestly, Ron,” and strode forward onto her tiptoes to throw her arm around his neck while Ron gathered her up by the waist, like it was instinct and he was in love with her.

Harry averted his eyes very quickly and promptly the room spun, leaving him dizzy.

He went back to the bar, despite himself, because the dancing crowd was belting out Weird Sisters hits from school that he’d never known the words to. There was someone new there, who recommended him Jägermeister again. Realising that Ginny and Matías must have ordered too much and none of these recommendations were genuine, Harry felt low, entirely unnecessarily. He asked for a whiskey instead and let his ears steam, a burn in his throat as he rambled away, his water and the glass left behind.

Ron and Hermione remained very much occupied.

He wondered where Luna and Neville had got to, before remembering how much he’d upset them. He spotted Angelina, Alicia and Katie laughing with a Weasley witch cousin at one of the tables, but didn’t think that he’d be welcome to join them. There was a group not far away from the dancefloor, all wizards in robes, and Harry thought that he could see himself at the centre of them – but it wasn’t him, in fact.

“Dad?” Harry asked, coming over, out of sync as everyone laughed. “What’re you doing here?” His dad hadn’t been alive to be invited in February, so it didn’t make sense.

He looked over his shoulder, and he realised that the Weasley witch cousin was his mum.

“Don’t call James _Dad,_ Harry,” someone was saying, groaning. It might have been Lee Jordan. Harry felt his face burn. “You’re making me feel old.”

“He can call me Dad if he wants to,” James immediately retorted, breaking through the group to wrap an arm around Harry’s shoulders. “I _am_ his dad,” he declared to the crowd, definitively, and Harry didn’t know what to do. “He is my darling son.”

The warm arm pulled across Harry’s shoulders and he didn’t think to resist, drawing into the hug as his dad kissed him on the crown of his head, them both the same height. If Harry failed to pull away afterwards, well, he failed to pull away afterwards, allowing himself to exist in this dream, a very healthy dream, undoubtedly, the feeling of his dad beside him warm and jostling as he laughed and told jokes and pointed at people – and Harry focused on the way the light hit the floor, shifting.

The group’s attention moved eventually to George, who was there, and he took the lead in a debate about supply chains. A London-based Núñez cousin took up the opposing line while Charlie looked nonplussed. Justin was chipping in about contracts.

“Dad,” Harry asked when he remembered. “How are you here?”

His dad pulled back, looking at Harry with his hand warm on Harry’s shoulder and scuffing his hair before he let him go. He grinned as Harry ducked. “We had a Mr Weasley in the floo,” he explained, nodding at George, who was complaining, wide-eyed, while Charlie laughed at whatever the Núñez cousin had said. “There’s stacks of drink left, and Ginny wants it drunk. She said it was fine; the press are all gone. Why do you ask?”

“No reason; I just…” Harry looked around the ball room, the flood of people dancing to whatever this music was, the groups of people laughing at the tables. The lights were dim, and he felt tired, all of a sudden. He didn’t recognise half of the guests and he didn’t understand it. “There’s so many people here,” he said stupidly, looking at them. “And now you’re here. Why isn’t Malfoy here?” Harry found himself asking again. “He’s our mate. I swear he’s Ginny’s mate. Why can’t everyone be mates?”

Harry could feel the tears swelling in his eyes. It was a stupid question, he knew, and he was embarrassed for himself. But everyone was so happy, here at this party, and Harry wanted Malfoy to be happy too. All Harry ever did was make people sad.

“We may never know,” Harry’s dad was telling him, evenly, as though Harry’s question wasn’t stupid at all. “I’m an optimist,” he let Harry down gently. “I’m convinced that most things turn to the good. But we can’t rely on that.”

The tears broke out of Harry in a sob. He didn’t mean for it to happen. Another sob came, and he couldn’t quite cover his face. It was utterly, categorically humiliating and entirely inappropriate. This was a _wedding_.

But his dad acted as though there was nothing to be frightened of. “Oh Harry,” he said evenly, pulling Harry back into his shoulder. “Have we arrived at this part of the evening already?”

Harry didn’t know what he was doing, sobbing in the face of all this happiness. He hiccoughed, and he couldn’t control himself, his eyes wet.

“You and Padfoot,” said his dad, holding his head and vigorously rubbing his back. “The pair of you – peas in a puffapod.”

“I’m supposed to be like _you_ ,” Harry spat, not thinking, screwing his eyes shut, his voice awful. “Everyone’s always said… The perfectest perfect Gryffindor lion.” He wasn’t thinking of a single thing. “But I’m _not_ , Dad,” Harry swore, deep. “I’m horrible. I’m a wolf.” A villain from a fairy tale. He knew that his dad remembered Ginny as Snow White; he assumed that he knew one of these too.

For now, Harry’s dad squeezed him roughly and ducked his head into Harry’s hair, warm while his tears subsided, and Harry forgot to forget that he needed him.

In the end, he spoke warmly and wry. “Why on earth would you want to be like me?” he asked Harry, so kindly, with such uncharacteristic self-deprecation, and Harry couldn’t tell if it was the booze or if his dad always sounded like this, up close instead of observed from far away. “ _I’m_ me. You’re much more interesting. Sneezy –” he shouted over Harry’s shoulder, distracting himself, presumably aiming for George. “Describe me in a word.”

“A twat,” came the distracted reply, not seriously. It raised a laugh from the group.

“You see?” Harry’s dad tried to tell him, starry-eyed.

“You’re not a twat,” Harry told him, mumbling and damp as he pulled back to wipe at his eyes. “You’re a stag. You’re s’posed to be –”

“No,” complained Harry’s dad, making Harry look up. “I am a _human being!_ ” He was clearly joking, too kindly, and it sounded like he was quoting something from somewhere, laughing at himself.

Harry found himself laughing too, sniffing.

“Let me take care of you,” Harry’s dad told him, twitching his glasses to look at Harry through the square lenses. “That’s all that I’m good for.” He ruffled a hand through Harry’s hair, presumably to make it look like he’d just come down off his broom.

“Stop it,” Harry told him, frowning, his stomach squirming like a child’s would. He reached up to try and flatten his hair back into shape.

“Why are you always trying to cover up that scar on your forehead?” his dad asked him, as if he didn’t know.

Harry hadn’t realised that this was something he still did.

They looked at each other for a moment, and Harry wiped his snotty nose.

His dad frowned, his eyes colourful and warm, and Harry almost told him everything, as though they were in the Gryffindor common room and his was a face looking concerned from the floo.

In the end, drunk as he was, his mind turned in another direction.

He wouldn’t remember asking this in the morning. “Dad, d’you ever wish that you’d –” The word stuck in his throat. “D’you ever wish that you’d not kept up with Wormtail, after Hogwarts?”

Holding a hand to the side of Harry’s neck, his dad blinked. “I don’t believe in regrets,” he said simply.

“Yeah, but –”

“That’s not what you’re asking,” allowed Harry’s dad, quick, his eyes meeting Harry’s with a glance. He took a breath before ducking his head, steadying himself, taking Harry by the shoulder. “Do I think about what could have been?” he rephrased the question. “Still no,” he decided, and Harry couldn’t tell whether or not he was lying. “He murdered my wife, he tried to murder my son, he put Padfoot in prison and your Uncle Moony –” He shook his head, as though he couldn’t quantify what had been done to Moony. “But before he did that,” he finished, “I would have had to suspect him.”

Frowning, he paused at this point, and he wasn’t fully sober, Harry thought. Or else Harry was so drunk that his eyes were seeing differently.

When he looked at Harry, he seemed to feel deep emotion, and it was a strange sight to Harry, this early in the summer. “He used to cheer me up when I down,” said Harry’s dad simply. “Your Uncle Padfoot and Moony are like brothers to me,” he explained, “but cheery they are not. I believed him to be entirely uncomplicated.”

“He was Ron’s pet rat for the first three years of school,” Harry found himself saying.

With a terrible cut of sadness in his eyes, his dad tittered, looking away. “That would have suited him down to the ground,” he admitted, his tone inexplicably fond.

With a sigh, then, as Harry watched, his smile turned, fading.

“The problem will always be,” said Harry’s dad solidly, “ _when_ should I have turned on him? What kind of person would that have made me? What kind of person would that have required me to be? I didn’t suspect him,” he went on, going over this point, “your mum didn’t suspect him… Padfoot suspected _everyone_ , including himself,” he scoffed dryly, rolling his eyes. “And Moony was away. The only thing I heard against him came from He Who Must Not Be Named, and maybe I lost my life – my family’s life – to nothing more than a double bluff. Reverse psychology. But I don’t think that he’d turned by that point,” insisted Harry’s dad.

At this point in the summer, Harry didn’t know what his dad was talking about – but he also wasn’t going to remember this conversation’s specifics, so that doesn’t matter.

What Harry was going to remember, somewhere deep inside of him, somewhere untouchable, was the way that his dad made him feel. The night of the wedding, he looked at Harry with conviction that there was virtue in upholding a virtuous principle, no matter the result. It wasn’t about means or ends or making choices, weighing things up; it was about doing what had to be done, and having faith that good would follow. It was something that Harry had believed in as a child.

It’s seductive, virtue. His dad didn’t realise, Harry thought, looking at him the night of the wedding, because he’d been seduced when he was still young, by Harry’s mum.

He was pontificating, going on, sure in the sound of his voice. “How can one expect to know where one’s turned up if one’s following a map where the details have been fudged? The number of times we went back and forth…”

In Harry’s eyes, right then, James Potter was an impossible model to live up to, and yet Harry was aware of how much he’d suffered for people thinking that they were the same. He’d had his hair shorn off as a child; he’d been sneered at by a teacher whom he’d only just met; he’d been called the wrong name and he’d been scoffed at by the one parent he’d ever known. He’d been fucked in the throat by some bloke behind a club.

There was something about James Potter that begged to be destroyed, Harry thought. There was something about him that people wanted to survive, but thought never could, and it hurt to see it existing. They’d rather it were gone than have it stick around with the promise of an ending.

And there are talents that Harry’s father’s long given him – flying, mostly – but Harry’s sure that he doesn’t deserve them. At the age of fifteen, he thought himself morally superior to a boy in a pensieve, but he doesn’t believe that anymore.

“All that one ends up doing is wasting time later, looking for bearings –“

They both died young, Harry and his dad. They both died for friends and family, supposedly. They both died at the same curse, the same hand.

But his dad had never needed a prophecy to help him make the choice, Harry thought at the wedding. He’d never needed Dumbledore to pat him on the head. It hadn’t been a game; it had been real life.

If death came calling again – and Harry could see it in his father’s eyes, the night of the wedding – he’d give up his life without hesitation. He loved too fiercely to do anything else, and he’d learnt that from Harry’s mum, whose green eyes are terrifying to look at, Harry finds.

Harry doesn’t think that he could do it again. He’s not sure that it was noble, what he did. He said that he died for his friends and for Hogwarts, at the time, but when he thinks about dying, he can’t recall thinking of them, not in the clearing, not at the close. He remembers thinking of the dead, and of Ginny.

He’s not sure that it’s possible, now, for death to find him, and he doesn’t know what it means that he’s forged his life to avoid it. He’s not sure that he trusts anyone enough that they could get him killed. He’s not sure he’s brave enough to, and he doesn’t trust himself.

He keeps his own secrets, and no one knows all of them. It’s Harry alone who knows where all three of the Deathly Hallows lie: Draco can only suspect about the elder wand; McGonagall can only suspect about the invisibility cloak. Ron and Hermione can only suspect about the resurrection stone.

And this is a secret of its own, Harry thinks, his fear of death – his last link to Voldemort, which he’s not sure will ever leave him. He stood there and he felt it, and King’s Cross was lovely, but he doesn’t like to stand still anymore, if he ever did, and he doesn’t like to think about kissing beautiful girls, their hair golden red.

He fell in love with Draco, Harry sometimes thinks, when he came back from death and the promise of his life let Harry live. He became a creature doomed to fall for him, Harry thinks other times, the very instant that he came back from death and felt plainly that once was enough. Draco remains the one person he knows with all certainty would never judge him for choosing to survive. For imagining the possibility. For imagining _any_ possibility, even when it makes him swear or leave to stew on it for a couple of days.

There’ll always be something between them.

(“Draco, that frog’s watching us.”

“So?”

“I’m not sure I like being watched by a frog.”

“You put up with the bear in the flat.”

“What’s the bear got to…? _Oh._ ”

“The bear spent all last night watching us. Don’t tell me that you didn’t get off on it.”)

Harry thinks about Ginny’s wedding again, the night when he sets his father on fire, the first of September. He thinks about it because the charm _Expelliarmus_ , whether cast or forced by hand, is only ever a battle of wills. Since Voldemort, Harry’s known that he can kill to survive – and maybe he should have known that since Quirrell, whenever his innocence was lost. His father will always be ready to die, and it makes his wand easy to steal. It makes it easy to kill him.

The night when Harry sets his father on fire, Harry thinks about Wormtail, and he wonders if this is how Wormtail felt. He wonders what the man must have done to begin with – or had done to him – to set him on the path to betraying James Potter. He wonders if, just like Wormtail, it wouldn’t be better if someone struck down Harry now, just in case. A plucky child, thirteen years old.

But it’s worth knowing that the wedding didn’t end for Harry with a conversation that he doesn’t remember.

Because it would have been fine, in all likelihood. Things moved to a table, where another round of food was popping in, the over-catering plain. The group was rowdy, cheerful, and everything felt like a Weasley event – at long last. If someone hadn’t brought over two bottles of Jägermeister, maybe, it would have been fine – or if Harry hadn’t thought to ask whether Sirius and Moony were planning to show up.

It’s not clear who said it, but someone pointed out that they’d always rated Lupin, thought he was a top bloke, but it would be a bit unlucky, wouldn’t it, to have a werewolf at a wedding?

The suggestion may have been aired by Ernie Macmillan, but we shan’t hold him to the opinion. He likes to imagine possibilities.

Bill was on Harry and his dad’s side, at least, as the argument started, because Lupin had been at Bill’s wedding to Fleur. The Weasleys were on their side in any case, because Bill likes his steaks more blue than pink, as Fleur puts it. And there’s the principle.

Most people these days think that Bill’s scars are from something neater and cleaner than fighting Fenrir Greyback, so at least one person thought it was fine to point out that Bill’s wedding hadn’t gone very well, what with the Death Eaters. It may have been Charlie, as a joke, mostly ironic – but it may have been someone else, who believed this to be true.

Harry didn’t know what to do with the anger he felt, the hot burning rage, because this argument was wank. He doesn’t like the term _Death Eater_ , also, instinctively and when he thinks it through, because it makes out that everyone in Voldemort’s camp was fanatical about his ideology. It’s playing Voldemort’s game, that assumption; it makes people’s actions their identity.

Despite his strong feelings, Harry’s never been good at political debate, and he’d had an awful lot to drink, at the wedding. He ended up shouting, and his dad was in it too – and they’re both good in a fight, but Harry was better, that night: nastier, a lot drunker, and he may or may not have stood up first and told someone else to stand up and say what they were saying to his face – before everything went sideways and Hermione was apparating Harry to Grimmo as the music cut out.

The three people Harry was missing were there in number 12, Grimmauld Place, the night of Ginny’s wedding: Moony was lying lengthways on one of the drawing room’s sofas; Sirius was deep in the other with his stocking heels propped in a cross on the coffee table. Draco sat on the arm near the fireplace with four feet of space between him and anyone else, and Harry wanted to press on it until it went pop and devoured him. It was past midnight, but there was a decanter of red wine, cheese and crackers. The three of them were having a lovely time, just like Luna had said.

He was the unlucky one, Harry supposed at this moment, and this was what he would remember more than anything. He’d been a horcux for so long, and it was possible that Dumbledore had got everything backwards. He’d been the product of Harry’s own head in King’s Cross. Most likely, the baby under the bench had been him: a baby that the Killing Curse had been trying to kill for sixteen years, which the Dursleys had never nurtured back to life.

Appearing in the warm yellow drawing room, there was wet blood dribbling from Harry’s nose, dampening his lip. He sniffed.

“I’m going back for Ron,” said Hermione shortly, and Harry couldn’t stand upright, the room turning. “With any luck, he’ll have calmed down your dad.” With a _pop_ she was gone again, and later in the summer Harry would think of the advice that pregnant women shouldn’t apparate, and what Hermione was willing to risk, when Harry didn’t deserve it.

“Potter, what have you done to yourself?” Draco snapped, sounding like someone whose evening had been ruined. He slipped from the sofa, black and white and simple, the glass of wine in his hand blood red to be left on the mantelpiece. He didn’t swoop like a bat; he prowled like something with an ego.

Maybe, Harry thought in a moment of weakness, he’d fallen in love with Draco because the sight of him existing made his heart ache, too exquisite for words.

“All the task entailed was to keep your mouth shut and let the witch say _I do_ ,” he was wittering on, close and filling Harry’s vision, working fingers through Harry’s hair as though checking for wounds. “Merlin –” He batted Harry’s hand away as he tried to wipe his nose and cast a wordless _Episkey_ , which made things feel better.

“I don’t even fancy her!” Harry declared, even as spilt blood was being siphoned off his face. The aftershock of battle was making him shake. There were tears in his eyes and he wanted to apologise.

“You don’t fancy anyone, according to you,” Draco said scornfully, arm around his shoulder and face to his temple as though to seal off the healing charm, not really planting a kiss, not really in front of other people. Harry didn’t know what he was doing, mostly shivering, shutting his eyes and wanting to hide, breathing in the smell of red wine. “Tell me that you didn’t call her a _reflex_ ,” Draco mocked.

It would be easier not to fancy anyone, Harry thought starkly in his head, and not for the first time. It would be safer. Charlie Weasley managed it, so Harry didn’t see why he couldn’t too. It would be best if he didn’t love anyone, if he lived without them and left the world undestroyed. It would be difficult, but he could try.

* * *

Until dawn, after setting his dad on fire, Harry doesn’t speak. The WASPs come, and Harry doesn’t know what the acronym stands for, Wizarding Accident Special Patrol or something else ridiculous. They wear yellow, black and green and they buzz. They put Harry’s dad in a tank of water, breathing through a snorkel, pure white, and they cast charms on the water more than on him.

Burnt robes are transfigured into some sort of jelly-like baby-gro, also white, though it covers James’s face too, puffed up with air inside. Out of the water, jelly now satin, he looks like a doll waiting to be clothed, to have its features picked out, the snorkel strange where it sticks out of the blob of his head like a spout.

If Harry were thinking in thoughts, he would expect for his mum to be distraught. Instead, her expression is focused and sharp. She spits questions at the healers, then insists on hovering Harry’s dad herself up the stairs to their room, because it’s a first-year charm and she was always very good at it. She pronounces it something like _Wingarjum livyoso,_ and one of the healers makes a face, as though surprised when the wand in her hand responds to her voice.

Draco acts as her second-in-command, neither of them pausing to decide it. He takes orders to set up the bedroom to the healers’ specifications and adjusts them when Harry’s mum’s more precise (“I fought in a war; I know what I’m talking about. How many severed limbs have you healed in the last three years?”). She’s not polite; she’s insubordinate; she’s wearing a sugar pink dressing gown with her hair in a plait, and it makes Harry’s heart twist, because he desperately wants to believe they’re the same.

As it is, he’s useless, shaking intermittently, sniffing. Sirius is holding him, an arm around his shoulders as though this was always his job. His arm is solid and warm, even more than Harry’s dad’s. He barks snide interjections when it seems as though the healers aren’t happy answering to the woman in the dressing gown, and he heals the bump on Harry’s head himself, soothes his burns.

They’re all of them terrible patients. Ron gets the story from Draco and shakes his head before leaving – most likely to fix the Dursleys’ front door and calm them down. Make sure that Uncle Vernon hasn’t had a heart attack. He’ll explain the situation, Harry thinks, which will save Harry a job. Ron’s good like that.

He comes back with red cheeks and bright eyes before it’s all over, an angry set to his jaw and a scowl as though he’s been shouting, but Harry doesn’t think about this.

The snorkel is an important piece of equipment, it turns out. The WASPs pour potions down it with a funnel, twitching as Harry’s mum sniffs the empty vials and mutters. Hermione takes down notes in her diligent round handwriting, wand aimed at the wall, alchemical calculations running in commentary to the side.

It’s like watching children play with sand, everyone guessing. Jittering, Harry wants to know why they bother with magic. He wants to ask; he’s holding his wand. He’s sure that he hates every spark of it.

“All right, that’s enough,” says Harry’s mum when the healers are packing their bags, likely more than happy to leave. “Good boy, Padfoot,” she commands with a nod, no hint of irony.

Sirius nods back, squeezing Harry again, who jitters.

“Let’s get some rest. Harrio, are you –”

From under Sirius’s arm, Harry’s eyes catch on his mother’s, and he sees fierce love in jade green. Despite the pensieve, he can’t believe that his eyes have ever looked like hers, and he knows that this is the reason why a man is dead in the ground.

“Oh Harryowl,” his mum says as she embraces him and as he shuts his eyes against her hair, not knowing how to apologise. There’s a stick in his hand; he’s holding it tight in his fist. He wants to drop it; he wants to snap it. He doesn’t know how.

Everyone else leaves the room at this point, presumably as Sirius rounds them up and drives them like sheep.

Harry’s mum rubs his back as he hiccoughs, and she’s smaller than him.

“It’s all right,” she promises, reaching up to hold him by the shoulders. “Your dad’s stubborn,” she promises, her eyes green.

Harry flinches, looking away.

“You never saw him in school,” his mum goes on, not letting him go. “He did loads of stuff like this, messing around. He turned his hands into treestumps – came to a test with toadstools for knuckles and still he made top of the class. Drove me batty,” she promises, squeezing, and Harry can imagine exactly the feeling of indignation. “He goes looking for trouble,” she promises, and Harry can’t look at her. “Something like this was always going to happen – it used to happen every three months. I’ve been telling Padfoot…”

She looks past Harry for a moment, worried, squeezing her hands, her gaze intense and in control.

“Why were you fighting?” she asks as she comes back, pushing and gentle, brushing hair off Harry’s forehead, too comforting, her eyes too green. “Draco was saying that you went to see the Dursleys?”

Harry can only look over her head, at the white bound figure of his dad, trying not to let her see too.

She tuts, Harry’s mum, a bite to the sound as though she’s hungry for the truth. Harry doesn’t understand her. He doesn’t know her, he’s certain of it.

“Come and sit with me and your dad,” she insists, pressing one hand to his cheek, too soft. Her other is tight on his shoulder. She hovers over the figure in white – so very gently – until there’s room for them both, climbing up and sitting with her back to the headboard, knees hunched to make her look like an owl.

Despite himself, Harry follows, taking hold of his knees too and looking down at them.

For a while, there’s silence – warm, though Harry doesn’t trust it.

His mum nudges him, in the end, and she’s wiggling her fingers through the breath that must be passing in and out of Harry’s dad’s snorkel.

“Makes you want to stick a flower in it,” she tries, conspiring.

Harry doesn’t find the image funny.

Sighing, his mum relents. “You’ve your dad’s temper, Harrio,” she chides, making him flinch. It doesn’t sound as though she’s being any more honest now – or as though she was being any less honest before. “And you’re an extraordinary wizard. Those two things together make it risky to love you.” She says it so candidly that it barely stings as she cuts in the wound. “But it’s been a risk to love you since before you were born. We do it anyway. Have you ever wondered why?”

Harry looks up away from her. The room that they’re in used to be Sirius’s, Harry knows, but it’s difficult to tell that anymore. The walls are magnolia, and above Sirius’s old chest of drawers – under which Harry once found a torn photograph – there are tacked dozens of pictures, whole, all candid shots from Grimmo and out and about, George’s shop. Many of them are of George and Angelina, all of Harry’s mum and dad’s friends. The rest of them are of the people whom Harry most loves, because his mum and dad love them too.

“Dumbledore wanted me to give you away,” his mum is going on, smaller than him at his side. From what Harry can see in the corner of his vision, she’s holding his dad’s shoulder, running a thumb along his protective coat’s seam – and Harry’s sure that his dad can feel it. “ _Muddy the waters a bit_ , is what he said. You and Neville both. Only till the war was over, you understand,” his mum qualifies sarcastically, before tutting. “We never told your Padfoot and Moony, but we had a downer on him after that.”

And Harry’s thought the same. The thing is, Harry wants to believe in Albus Dumbledore, the wizard on the card from his first chocolate frog, the first thing to see him make a friend. No one in the mirror was there to give him a present, but Dumbledore gave him a cloak.

“I always liked him,” Harry’s mum adds casually now, as though Harry’s asked or they’re gossiping. “I found him comforting. He always knew the right thing to say. But there were some things that I wouldn’t give up,” she explains. “I don’t think it’s a problem, to disagree sometimes – and that’s one point where Dumbly and I disagreed.” She says it easily. “If you’re fighting a war, you need to know what you’re fighting for – and I’m sorry to be mushy, but holding your dad’s babby in my arms was one of those things.”

Harry’s heart sinks, and this is it, he imagines. This is the moment that his mum, last of everyone, says that she loves him for reminding her of James Potter, no matter that they’re not at all the same.

But – “Then I held _you_ in my arms,” his mum says, sounding frustrated. “And I couldn’t understand why anyone would dare try and take you away. The nerve of it!” she exclaims, filling the room with the sound. “You were mine,” she says, tapping her spare hand to her chest, and they’re not really looking at each other. “It was written in the sky, written in the pavement… These old men, Mackers used to call them – they’re all as bad as each other. What was the difference between one old git trying to kill us and the other one trying to steal you from me?”

She drops her head to her shoulder and Harry can feel her eyes.

“She was a bit _reactionary_ , your Auntie Mackers,” she confides in him, wry. “She read a lot of books.”

It’s not enough to make Harry laugh.

“The difference was that Professor Dumbledonia could feel remorse,” Lily goes on, not waiting for a reaction. “He was lost in his own head, I think, half the time. He couldn’t bear making missteps; he’d try and turn it around on you. Your dad wouldn’t have it, and I wasn’t having it either – and he was always playing a game – but he felt it so much, you could see it. And he _knew_ what that bastard was going to do; he always knew it. He was clever.”

She pauses now, for a moment, and with the hand not holding onto his dad she pats Harry’s knee.

“That’s why I love you, babby owl,” she says calmly. “The way you feel things. We were all half numb by the end of it, but you’d feel so much joy, so much sadness… I only had to look at you, and I’d remember what they felt like.”

Risking a glance at her face, Harry’s surprised to see that she’s frowning.

“I’ve always thought it a good feeling, anger,” she says now, glancing at him, her eyes a deep sea green. “If you can still feel angry, you know you’re not dead,” she says, and it’s an easy claim to understand. “And I don’t want you to feel angry,” she goes on seriously, as though she once fought in a war. “I want you to feel happy. I want to hear you and your dad laughing together, because you don’t laugh the same, and I don’t know what it would sound like…”

She swallows, her eyes blazing, and it makes Harry sniff.

“But I’ll always love you for being mine,” she says at last, and she’s smiling, her eyes gleaming. “For being your dad’s and everyone else’s in this house… I’ll love you for never blaming other people, no matter how much you pretend – because you’re no good at pretending, you know. I see it all there in your face.” She touches his cheek again, her look knowing. “And I love you for that,” she promises, meeting Harry’s eyes. “For wearing your heart on your sleeve where I can see it.” For the first time, her voice sounds wet. “That’s why I fell for him, I think, the Michelin Man,” she promises more, nodding to Harry’s dad. “He reminded me of you.”

Somewhere deep in his chest, Harry feels a great well of pity for the boy who fell in love with Lily Evans, who never had a choice in becoming an occlumens, or at least never felt as though he had one.

As for himself, Harry doesn’t know why his mum is letting him off. _Love_ is not a good reason.

She lapses into silence, after this, frowning. She squeezes Harry’s knee and sets her head back against the headboard, squeezing her eyes shut, in the end. Harry thinks that he can see every one of her emotions.

They’re sitting in the light, but his mum’s asleep eventually, holding Harry’s knee, his dad’s shoulder. In the silence, Harry begins to hear his dad’s breathing, gently whistling. He’s sleeping too, Harry’s sure.

As the light outside turns to dawn, Harry leaves them because he knows that he doesn’t deserve them, and he knows what will keep them safe. He slips out of the door and makes his way downstairs, turning through the empty doorway to the flat.

There are voices in the kitchen, which is strange. Harry’s too tired to pretend that he does anything besides tread softly to the wall by the doorframe and listen.

“…find out about the cupboard?” Sirius is asking, his tone grave and low.

It’s Draco’s voice that answers. “No, I don’t think so.” His tone is grave too. They both sound like aristocrats. “It was clear that he’d been passingly neglected, and he’d been told that his parents were worthless.”

Draco will have gone back to his office, Harry thinks. He’ll have wanted to tidy things up. He can’t sleep if his office is untidy. Sirius must have got bored and waited up for him.

As for now, Sirius tuts. “It used to mean everything to him, Harry’s welfare.”

Stomach in his knees, Harry assumes that they’re talking about his dad.

They aren’t, it turns out.

“He took it as a point of pride, that we could at least get James’s son to the end.” Sirius goes on, wry, “If not unscathed, then… He never wanted to be a father,” he finishes, his broken heart palpable.

“Tough,” says Draco mercilessly, dark. “He should have taken the boy and run.”

“To where?” asks Sirius, ignoring Draco’s tone entirely. “His mum’s bedsit, with all that mould he couldn’t magic away? He was living in a squat until he met Gary and Tone.”

“The landlords?” Draco picks up on this point, and Harry does too, thinking of GD. “He mentioned them to Figg.”

It makes Sirius laugh, the sound a brilliant snigger. “ _Landlords,_ ” he quotes scathingly. “They were a drag queen and a DJ who picked him up out of the gutter. I reckon he shagged one or both of them, and fuck if they ever made him pay rent. It was Tone’s flat, he told me –”

“The DJ?” Draco moves to clarify.

“Yes, the DJ,” Sirius tells him impatiently, as though Draco should be keeping up. “It was cheap and he’d been on the scene through disco… It was a _fuck you_ to me,” Sirius states categorically, arrogant, as though this is the important point, referring to Moony again. “He worked himself to the bone to pay halves on our flat when he was there.” He scoffs, worked up, ranting as though he’s talking to family. “You know, the first time he went off for Dumbledore, he had the gall to suggest that I could sublet the office.”

“What did you say to that?” Draco asks as though he’s amused, talking to family.

“I told him that the office belonged to Athanasius, and Athanasius needed his space.” There’s a pause before Sirius clarifies, “Athanasius was my owl.” He goes on, “And then I told him that I’d get more for renting out his side of the bed – if I wasn’t worried what it would do to my looks, becoming a whore.”

Draco snorts.

The humour in Sirius’s voice turns again. “And then I told him to fuck off if he was fucking off, and that I would decide what would be done with my own fucking flat.”

Repulsed by the swearing, Harry looks down at the floor – at his hands, which are dry and raw from the flames. His arms are bronze from his and Draco’s holiday, no matter that it feels long ago.

He should fuck off if he’s fucking off, he thinks – and it’s the first of September.

The mirror in the hallway says nothing as Harry passes by, only hisses, very quietly.

The light in the bedroom is hazy, almost dark, but Harry doesn’t bother with a light. He moves to the wardrobes, taking out his tan leather backpack, the colour of waxed oak. There’s no end to the promise of its insides. Hermione made it that way, for Christmas in 1998. Harry doesn’t usually take it with him to Hogwarts, but he thinks that he might need it this time.

The robes that Harry keeps at Grimmo are colourful, compared to Draco’s. They rotate between his Hogwarts wardrobe and here, depending on what he’s wearing when he comes in from school and what he’s wearing when he goes back. If he’s not coming back, he needs all of them, so into the backpack they go, just in case.

After this, Harry moves to the trunk by the chair in the corner, where the hand-towel bear always sits. It’s seen a lot of things, and it sees Harry now. It’s the first thing he speaks to, since begging his dad not to go. “It’s been good, bear,” he says, missing Puff the dragon, looking forward to seeing him. “We’ve had a good run. You’ll look after him, won’t you?”

“His name is Humphrey.”

Draco’s voice makes Harry startle, violently enough that he slams his funny bone into the trunk, which hurts and makes a _clunk_. He’s down on one knee and Draco is framed by the doorway, his eyes like pits in the gloom.

“When was that decided?” Harry asks, his heart stopping.

“He’s my bear,” Draco claims, shutting the door behind him, sharp angles of black against shadowed white. He always calls the bear a pervy fuck. Sometimes Harry comes home to find him sleeping with it of his own volition (“He seduced me.”). “I wasn’t aware that you required consultation.”

This is a dig about something or other. Kneeling on the floorboards, elbow throbbing, backpack open, Harry feels as though he’s been caught in the act.

“Where are you going?” Draco asks shortly.

“Hogwarts,” Harry answers truthfully, climbing up to his feet, rubbing his elbow. “It’s arrivals day; there’s –”

“I am aware of the date,” Draco mocks him, crossing his arms. “You’ll be expected in Hogsmeade approximately twelve hours from now. The floo journey will take all of twelve seconds. Do you intend to tart yourself up for eleven hours and fifty-nine minutes?”

Looking at him, Harry’s not sure how best to respond.

“I can give you three of those minutes for the shower,” Draco goes on, his demeanour like frozen mist, untouchable. “That’s how long it usually takes you.”

He’ll need to have a shave as well, Harry wants to point out.

“I…” Harry doesn’t know what to say, besides the part about shaving, which would not be well received. There are too many thoughts in his head, all half finished, all too complicated to explain.

Draco’s gaze is on Harry’s open bag, on the floor by the trunk. Flashing with accusation, his eyes meet Harry’s for a moment, not pale but dark in the bedroom’s gloom. “Your father will be fine,” he says coldly. “The dressing’s to be removed at midday. It would be the moment to apologise,” he suggests, utterly sarcastic. “You know that he’ll forgive you; he’s your _father._ ”

“He shouldn’t,” Harry can’t help saying, sniffing and wiping his nose.

“He will,” Draco says without pause.

“No he won’t,” Harry tells him more firmly, looking away. He doesn’t intend to give the man a chance.

Since he’s looking away, Harry misses the moment – the very single moment – when he could have prevented what happens next. Maybe part of him wants it to happen, and that’s why he’s looking away. Maybe it’s nothing more than a lapse in concentration, because he hasn’t slept at all in the last twenty-four hours, and they’ve been a full set of hours indeed.

As it is, standing by the door, Malfoy pulls his wand from his sleeve and non-verbally casts _Accio_ at Harry’s leather backpack, which whips from the floorboards to his hands at the call. Before Harry can react – which is either luck or good timing for Malfoy – he casts a more complicated charm, holding the tip of his hawthorn wand to the leather and speaking aloud. “ _Constare_.”

This is the charm which makes an object unsummonable. It’s a simple concept, but a tricky charm.

“Malfoy!” Harry snaps at him, reacting, his own wand never put away. His countering _Accio_ is nonetheless a second too late. “Get out of there –”

“Why?” Malfoy asks like a git.

Harry throws light to the ceiling so that he can see his face.

Blinking, Malfoy doesn’t let go of the open bag. “What do you keep in here that you don’t want me seeing?” His expression is fierce, his jaw tight, his eyes strained with exhaustion. His hair needs a wash, but so does Harry’s, and Harry can admit that he likes Malfoy this way, on edge and intense. It’s not healthy, most likely, but he’s not sure that desire ever is.

Locking eyes with him, across the room, Harry tries to sound sincere. His heart pulls at his throat. “There’s nothing; just stuff.”

“Well,” Malfoy observes, the nod of his head to his shoulder mannered and glacial. “You need not cart _stuff_ up and down the country.”

It strikes Harry that Malfoy must be very angry right now. He might be angrier with Harry than he’s been in ten years.

A subtle twist of hawthorn, and he casts another charm. Aimed between the bag and the huge grey bed, roughly made, Malfoy casts what might be _Disgorgeo_ , a charm for unpacking trunks. Harry’s only ever heard about it; he doesn’t know the counter. He’s never unpacked in his life.

“ _Finite incantatem,_ ” he tries, but it doesn’t work.

The invisibility cloak is the first thing to pull free from the bag, shimmering through the air to fold itself up as though it belongs in a shop. It lands soft and square on the duvet.

“ _Malfoy,_ ” Harry tries.

He gets a look.

A few old bits and bobs from Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes come next – coiled up Extendable Ears, a sealed tin of Peruvian Instant Darkness. There are the robes Harry packed and Harry’s old tent, inside which he and Malfoy first got together.

“How nostalgic,” Malfoy remarks, and Harry can’t speak.

“You don’t know what you’ve… _Finite,_ ” he tries again, but it doesn’t work.

Hagrid’s old album of photographs comes next, still precious after all these years, the leather cover soft and used. There’s the inscribed shell from the Hogwarts mer, something else special, and that comes to join the album on the bed. Harry’s supposed to have been working on it.

“What secrets,” states Malfoy, with arrogance –

Then Harry swallows, because the next thing to emerge is his painting from the Summer Exhibition, safe in its bubblewrap, lovely and simple and colourful.

“Yes, I thought you were lying,” Malfoy notices. “I knew that there wasn’t a hold-up.”

Harry keeps his mouth shut, because he doesn’t know what to say. He couldn’t have been expected to _open_ it, could he, after Moony disappeared?

Moony’s briefcase comes next, brown and tied up with string, and Harry dashes to grab it, because it isn’t his to be laid bare.

“What is _that?_ ” Malfoy demands –

– but already there are other things emerging from the bag, too many things, and they look like books, on first glance, but they aren’t. The charm is speeding up.

“What – ?” Malfoy goes quiet.

And Harry closes his eyes, because they’re maps. Dozens of them. A-Zs and roadmaps, their map from France, which Harry doubts Malfoy’s thought about since. There’s a complete set of ordinance survey maps, which cost less than Harry would have thought, bought over six years or so, a couple of duplicates of the Pennines because Harry forgot that he had them.

He can trace things anywhere in the country, if he likes, apart from the unplottable places. He can figure out how to get anywhere.

He’s otherwise maps of places that he’ll surely never go, though he’d like to, like Morocco and Mongolia and Mexico, and there are some antiquarian ones, both wizarding and muggle, rolled up in tubes when Harry knows that they should be framed.

“ _Harry,_ ” Malfoy’s saying, against the soft whicker of paper and parchment through the air. Neat runs are forming on the bed, to be placed on a bookshelf, maps slotting into order, tubes into stacks.

He spent hundreds of galleons on some of them.

Watching them fly, Harry’s nerves rush and he swallows – and there are heavier things coming free of the backpack. Because he’s bought prints and posters at exhibitions before, when he’s been weak. He’s bought books on photography and Fauvism, a movement he likes. He’s kept at least twenty of Teddy’s old drawings from school. They’re forming piles on the floor.

There are wall mirrors, two of them. Large and round and yet able to stretch free of the leather bag, which was made for this. The mirrors have different frames, one thin in soaped ash and one gilt, wrought in a filigree pattern of needles and pinecones, which took Harry ages to cast. The charms are finished; they’re linked. He made them in time for Malfoy’s birthday.

Malfoy stares at him, his eyes glinting wary with shock as the mirrors gleam and reflect. Harry wants to tell him –

But there are clothes that Harry’s bought, after this, and they make him feel sick, folding themselves up into piles on the duvet, billowing before they go, their creases eased out. There are jeans he bought to wear to the pub when he knew that Hermione was bringing someone with her. Nice trainers, some in black and some in some in white, some in colours, a pair in red that Harry’s not sure about, though he liked them in the shop.

There’s a jacket that cost him more than his painting, an aviator jacket in shearling, not black like Sirius’s jacket for biking, but brown. It must be too seventies in style, but Harry likes the idea of it: it’s clearly warm and it’s a darker colour than his backpack, chestnut brown with a shine like a conker. It lays itself out like a lover.

Harry likes to think that he could wear it a hundred feet in the air and still not feel cold – until he remembers that he doesn’t fly anymore, for too many reasons, not least the fear of falling, not least the fear of enjoying it.

There are books. There are so many books, joining those on the bed, on the floor, and Malfoy comments on these. “This is a full edition of Viridian,” he says, his voice barely masking his surprise as he plucks a musty bound brick from the air, putting down the bag. “Complete in six volumes.” He catches the rest.

It’s long out of print, Viridian, which is sensible considering that it’s a compendium of jinxes, hexes and curses; they only sell the abridged version now, with all the silly ones repackaged for mischievous kids.

“Yeah, I know,” Harry says, the room too bright around them.

“You said that it couldn’t be found.” Malfoy’s cradling the books, looking down as though they’re newborn animals. “You said that you were sick of going through Pince.”

“I never did find it,” Harry confesses, not sure at all what to do. “That’s Ollivander’s.”

He’s approaching the bed, Malfoy, his arms full of books, the stream of things bending around him. Harry watches, wondering if now is the moment to run.

An angled figure in black robes, Malfoy puts down Viridian and paws at the piles of clothes, their price tags attached. “These are expensive,” he observes, fingering a pair of jeans.

“I bought them to try and turn you on,” Harry tells him, and his grey eyes flash to Harry’s, though his mouth doesn’t move. “Then I’d stick with my knackered ones.”

“I…” Malfoy shakes his head, as though he doesn’t know what to say. His fingers graze the leather of Harry’s jacket, burying themselves in the fluffy collar. “I would have remembered you wearing this,” he insists.

“I never have,” Harry confirms.

It makes Malfoy laugh, for some reason, the sound twisted as it comes out of him. “What the fuck?” is all that he seems able to say, looking around as ten years of purchases continues piling up.

Harry is holding Moony’s briefcase, wand in his hand.

One of Harry’s old puzzleboxes is the last thing to emerge from the backpack, from when Harry was learning runes. A sphere of harlequin marquetry, engraved. Kreacher wasn’t able to open it, which led Harry to decide that he was ready to start writing wards. The box itself isn’t important – Harry’s sure that it’s an amateur effort, compared to what he could manage these days – but there are the most precious things of all hidden inside, now landing on the bed: the shard of Sirius’s mirror; his mother’s letter; the snitch from his first game at Hogwarts, which will always remind him of the exhilaration he felt at eleven, to discover freedom and the connection between him and his –

Grimmo is very much a giant puzzlebox, large enough to hide fully grown people inside it. The house is unplottable, and there are secrets and runes hiding it away –

“I’m going to go and find Uncle Moony,” Harry says, because Moony’s always been missing. The sun is coming up; he can feel it more than he can see the light through Malfoy’s curtains. “That’s what I was doing, so I’ll go back to that. Sorry that I didn’t… It’s arrivals day at school, and there’s the feast –”

“You cannot _contemplate_ leaving now!” Malfoy declares, turning on a heel to look at him. His eyes are wide, disbelieving, and his left hand rises; he breathes from the back of his wrist. His unicorn wand is in his right hand.

“I have to go –” Harry’s not sure what else to say. He feels jittery, the more he takes in all the stuff on the bed, on the floor. It’s pathetic, piles and piles of nonsense.

“How _dare_ you?” Malfoy spits, switching his wand through the air but too controlled to let loose a spell.

It makes Harry react anyway. He steps back and his own wand is up in front of him. He’s terrified that his lips move to form a hiss.

“You don’t speak to me for weeks,” Malfoy rants, as though he’s on his last nerve. Harry doesn’t know why; he was laughing with Sirius. “You break into my office – my _office_ , with your _father_ , who takes us on a muggle mystery tour of suburbia, all in time for your wand to spontaneously combust – so, what, it can be born again? – and now you give me _this_ ,” he finishes with nothing but scorn, gesturing with his hand towards the bed.

He tries to step forward, but he trips on a tall pile of photography magazines. Harry read up on everything for about eighteen months, before he decided that he wasn’t going to buy a camera after all. At least not a muggle one. He’s never worked out where wizards buy their cameras. He’s never asked.

“Fuck you, Harry Potter,” Malfoy snaps, kicking over the magazines with one well planted foot. “You were keeping this in our wardrobe –”

“It’s your wardrobe,” Harry finds himself mumbling.

“It’s _your_ fucking wardrobe, you fucking _bastard!_ ” Malfoy swears at him, low, his eyes like darts and his expression livid. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the one who lives with _you_ and _your_ family in _your_ fucking house, which _your_ beloved godfather bequeathed –”

“He’s _your_ mother’s cousin,” now Harry finds himself shouting. He’s not stopped jittering, and he’s still holding onto Moony’s briefcase. He’s thinking of Malfoy and Sirius sniggering (“A drag queen and a DJ…”). “ _You’re_ the one who’s cosy with him, all gay and posh and disenfranchised –”

“All _gay?_ ” Malfoy repeats, as though he doesn’t know what Harry means. He and Sirius both know what they’re about, not like Harry.

“Don’t be coy,” Harry tells him, and he doesn’t know _why_ he can’t stop doing this. “You know that my mum thinks you’re aces. And my dad thinks you’re weird, but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about and that’s better than _me_. They’re both scared of _me_. And –”

Harry wants to move on quickly from this thought. Malfoy is only staring at him, so he does.

“And don’t think that I haven’t seen you being matey with Moony,” Harry goes on, and his vision is blurring, his eyes stinging sharp. He sees a photograph on his mum and dad’s wall of them in the garden; he sees real life. “The pair of you smoking and smirking and sidelined – _oh yes, sui generis, puff puff,_ ” he mocks them, and he doesn’t care that he sounds deranged. “I can’t tell if he fancies you –”

“Don’t be _absurd_ –”

“Or if he wants to adopt you. Him and Sirius, they’re basically the gay dads you never –”

“What are you _talking_ a–”

“So it’s all for you, really. I’ll find him, and it’ll be for you. You’ve got Humphrey to keep you… Let me be useful and do this one thing, and then I’ll –”

“ _Harry_ –”

Harry disapparates, lurching into it almost without thinking. He’s Moony’s briefcase in his left hand and his wand in his right. He’s wearing old trainers, and these things are all that he needs to take him to the Hogwarts gates, unplottable though they may be.

The gates open wide to welcome him home, unlatching even before the world seems solid around him. He has the clothes on his back and a mystery, the might of his own phoenix magic. He doesn’t need anything else and he doesn’t know why he’s ever pretended that he might.

Blinking the tears from his vision, Professor Harry Potter sets off into the dawn down the old, cobbled driveway which thestrals take, drawing carriages towards the castle. Hagrid’s in the distance, off to pursue some task in the forest. His arm rises like a flag as Harry waves good morning, greeting him in the east, like the sun.


	13. An adventure, part 2

The first week of term is the first week of term. It’s speeches, mostly, more than lessons. Excuses from students about their summer homework.

On Saturday, at the end of the week, Harry comes down south to see Teddy, and it’s disorientating to find himself in an unstructured environment. It’s unpleasant and the air prickles sharply because Teddy doesn’t want to see him. Cousin Draco sat him down on Tuesday night with his grandma – the night after Harry went back to Hogwarts – and they told him that his dad had been missing for four weeks.

Teddy promptly went into school on Wednesday, got into a fight with AJ and a physical fight with one of the other children, refused to do his maths and ended Friday with a suspension for the coming Monday after breaking his caution by shoving over Adam Daniels during football.

He likely wouldn’t have been punished so harshly if he’d been able to explain what was going on at home. He didn’t because he understands the Statute of Secrecy, its importance above all else.

Part of Harry which can only be disturbed by hard violence accepts that this demonstrates, in the end, that Teddy’s mature for his age and that he likely could’ve coped with starting Hogwarts this year. This was what Andromeda meant about Teddy getting distracted, because the Statute is only going to pinch harder, as everyone in his class starts talking about their next school.

As it is, Teddy receives Harry from the floo at the end of this week with a look of betrayal and he shouts at him, calls him a liar, most of all when Harry tries to explain that his dad –

“Oh yeah?” Teddy’s eyes are turning Black-family grey in his rage, neither pale nor dark, stone nor smoke under his heavy curling fringe. “And where’s your dad? I s’pose he hates you, and that’s why he’s stuck around.”

Harry’s not sure where he wants Teddy’s eyes to settle. His nose is straightening and shrinking, though it’s still little more than a button. He’s going to hate himself when he looks in the mirror, all his dad’s features scrubbed away. Harry keeps trying. “Sometimes it’s difficult to be around people you –”

“And I bet _your_ dad finds it proper difficult,” Teddy sneers, squinting and small like a mouse, “to be around people like _you._ ”

The lightbulb blows at this point, and Harry’s wand’s in his hand to cast _Protego_ , even as he flinches. The shower of glass fragments streams off the shield. In the distraction, Teddy escapes and he runs ratatat up the stairs to slam his bedroom door, kicking it or smacking it, by the sound of things, for good measure.

Repairing the lightbulb – giving up and conjuring a new one – Harry reflects that Teddy’s anger is most likely fair. And he could have run out of the house, into the road.

“There’s no BMX and no Xbox,” Andromeda tells Harry calmly, as he ventures to find her in the kitchen. “No computer and no cake after tea.”

It’s uncanny, Andromeda’s posh voice saying _tea_ and meaning an evening meal.

“He’s mostly staying in his room and reading his books,” she concludes, looking entirely content with her arms crossed, everything clean.

“You shouldn’t restrict food as a punishment,” Harry says, because he’s read that somewhere or other in his life.

“Nonsense,” says Andromeda. The kitchen they’re in hasn’t been redone since the eighties. It’s not as big as Aunt Petunia’s, but it was made to look good, once upon a time. “Controlling food and liberty of movement makes physical the experience of power. It’s comforting, in a way; it defines the relation between us. Have you never read Foucault?”

Harry shakes his head. He doesn’t say that he might have lived through it instead.

Besides, he’s spent all week not letting himself have pudding, because it makes him think of Puff, which makes him think of Draco. Harry’s been trying to convince himself that there’s no difference between living with an insomniac occlumens and living with a temperamental, pompom-breathing soft toy, but it’s not been going well.

McGonagall’s been looking at him strangely, maybe because of the pudding, more likely because Harry and Neville are being cool with each other. It’s not Neville. Neville’s clearly forgiven Harry for the wedding; Harry’s annoyed with him for it and freezing him out.

With a sigh, Andromeda looks at him, here in her kitchen at the end of the first week of September. “Teddy’s had a shock,” she says bluntly. “The most important thing now is to maintain his routine. He’s always known the risks of not behaving in school; he has to realise that the rest of his world remains unshaken.”

It’s not Teddy’s fault, though, Harry thinks. Maybe it’s right for him to face some sort of punishment, because Adam Daniels won’t have deserved to get shoved – but Teddy’s always been behaved before. He’ll have a new teacher, but they should realise that something’s off the moment they talk to Miss Gray from Year 5. Especially when it’s the first week back after summer. One of the Ravenclaws in seventh…

Here in the kitchen, Harry wants to suggest that they tell the school something. Even if it’s the most ridiculous soap-opera plot in the world. AJ’s mum Annie already thinks that Harry’s living in a soap opera, getting off with Teddy’s mum’s cousin, so what’s the return of a dad presumed dead? They can’t do this all year.

But Andromeda’s looking at him calmly, and Harry can only think of her suggestion in not so many words that Harry isn’t family. Which means that it isn’t his place to say anything.

“I’ll be off, then,” Harry says, thinking that he would never have allowed cake or lack of cake to be brought into the proceedings, if he’d been asked. If Teddy had been his. “Tell Teddy that I’ll see him next week.”

He goes for a walk around the quiet suburban streets, passing by the skate park, where AJ and Max and their mates are all riding. He passes through to the grassy field, where there are old rusting white football posts and bins telling dog-owners not to leave their litter, and he sits on a bench near the under-8s playground to watch the clouds in the sky.

Half an hour later, he apparates back up to Scotland.

There’s a letter waiting for him in his office, from his mother.

Harry looks at it for a long time, caught on the tail of the Y at the end of his name and the way that the ink has dried on the parchment. He’s not sure how to open it; he can’t bear the thought of tearing it as he slits a knife under the seal.

He wants to reply, but he doesn’t know what the letter says and he doesn’t know what he can say.

He tries to leave it, setting it aside to do some marking. This doesn’t help.

In the end, refusing to think too much about he’s doing, Harry goes to the desk in his private rooms and opens the bottom drawer. There’s a thick fold of parchment inside, which he doesn’t have use for anymore. It never feels sporting to spy on the students after hours; it feels worse than that. He doesn’t do it.

Fax Bardley may only have felt a great deal of Slytherin pride, Harry thinks as he pulls out the Marauder’s Map, sitting up at the desk. Even if he wanted Voldemort back. He could have been Marcus Flint’s biological father, with those photos the only photos he had. It’ll always be impossible to know.

Refusing to think any more, Harry leaves for the owlery to send the Marauder’s Map to his mother, so that she can at least watch his dot, if she needs to. He tucks her letter unopened between some books on the bookcase, for Puff to keep safe.

* * *

In the mornings, Harry can’t lie in bed. It’s worse in the dark when he’s alone, in the castle with only frail light coming in through the arrowslit windows. For too many years, growing up, lying on his own in the dark was the only pastime he had and he can’t bear it now.

Instead, Harry gets up, and at Hogwarts he goes running. His rooms are on the second floor, and they’re close to the entrance hall. From here he makes his way down to the forest, past Hagrid’s hut, the chimney of which is often letting out its very first tendrils of smoke.

He takes his wand with him, and he’s wearing his trainers, and that’s all he needs.

There are many paths to follow through the forest, all approximately the same length, each as uneven as the others. Harry’s sprained an ankle a few times over the years, but with practice he’s grown used to running over stones and roots, feeling his way alongside stretches of mud. When it rains in the winter, the most familiar paths turn to streams, but he doesn’t resent it; he adapts.

Sometimes, when he’s two or three miles in, thinking of nothing, Harry sees a centaur from the corner of his eye. It’s easier in early September, when he’s running in the light. They always keep watch on him. It’s because centaurs believe that there are better things to come one day, after death, which makes them suspicious of Harry and his choice. They revere him, Harry fears, because they think that he’s given up on Valhalla to rid the mortal world of Voldemort, or something like that. He’s not entirely sure that they’re wrong.

Sometimes, very rarely, Harry doesn’t see a centaur but an ancient Ford Anglia, gone feral with the woods. It makes him smile, usually, but Harry has a feeling that the next time he sees it he’ll cry.

Tuesday morning, in the second week of September, Harry doesn’t see a centaur or a car, but a stag – darting away from a clearing as Harry comes close.

It’s not –

Harry thinks that it’s only a stag. But he also thinks about the Marauder’s Map, and what he’ll have unwittingly revealed to his mother.

He talks to Babbling at breakfast, because it’s the only time she makes sense, and Neville is always in late. In lessons, Harry tells stories to teach boggarts to the third years, and he doesn’t think about the source of them.

There’s a reason for putting boggarts at the start of the year. Filch directs a deep clean over the summer, no matter that he long should have retired, and that always turns up one or two. In the lessons themselves, Harry’s quite good at avoiding the boggarts’ line of sight, but after each one he’s faced with a dementor again.

His _Riddikulus_ is powerful enough that he doesn’t need to think of anything funny, like a child. In fact, he has to temper the charm to leave the boggart alive to keep in his drawer. On Thursday, after the Hufflepuffs, he muffs it. The badgers have left the boggart weak, and the thing explodes into smoke.

It’s far enough into term that the only boggart left for the Slytherins is strong. Harry teaches the lesson, and at the end the dementor’s unfazed by Harry’s casting. Slytherins are typically more driven by fear than its defeat; he should have anticipated this and let the Hufflepuffs have at their own.

Staring at the boggart dementor from the other end of the classroom, past the desks which have all been pushed back, Harry thinks that he can hear the first whisper of his parents’ murders in 1981. They’re fleshed out now, the tone of them, his mum’s accent and the cadences of his father’s desperation. It’s a tricky thing, memory, and Harry thinks it entirely unfair that this one has grown more vivid.

There’s a wand in his hand, but he needs another memory too. He can only think of his dad, burning up in a ball of fire – and he can hear it, the rush of flames and his own tearing voice. He can see Draco’s look of betrayal, surrounded by a mess of incomplete dreams.

For the first time in years, Harry’s patronus won’t come when he calls it, not the stag and not the wolf – of _course_ not the wolf, right now when he needs it. He thinks of Luna’s voice in his ear (“That’s right, Harry; we’re all still here,”), but it isn’t enough. There are more flames and he’s flying; he’s in the great hall and sounding off about things that he can only guess. Then he’s in the forest, not running but walking into a clearing, four ghosts his only companions, and he’s remembering Ginny, his chin high as he looks into red eyes.

He’s discovered by one of the Slytherin third years, who wants him to reconsider the mark that he gave her summer homework. She thinks that destroying a boggart is surely enough to change an E to an O.

With a show of reluctance, Harry changes the mark, which means nothing, but doesn’t give her points, which means a lot. The Slytherin prefects keep track of who’s lost and gained points, to determine the picking order for everything ever managed in Gryffindor by first-come-first-served. Harry thinks that it’ll give the girl something to think about, when she realises that she’s been done.

He feels badly about it the moment she leaves.

Locking the classroom to return to his office, Harry makes a mental note to tell the story to Draco, details fudged, because it’ll make his eyes light up curious and thoughtful and amused. He’ll have an opinion, and that will help Harry sort through his emotions. Then he remembers that he’s left him.

* * *

The third week of term brings the full moon to Hogwarts, the sound of a dog howling in the courtyard below Harry’s window. It’s officially Harry’s job, on full moons, to make sure that there’s no wolf on site and that any dog he hears _is_ a dog – an old part of the contract, from at least the eighteenth century. Harry thinks that it would have made his Uncle Moony laugh, if only ever darkly.

Throwing on fresh robes – because yesterday’s have already been taken by the elves – Harry treads into black trainers and makes his way out and down the grand marble stairs to the entrance hall, past the massive suits of armour. “At ease,” he murmurs as he passes them, because they answer to all of the teachers and the old Gryffindors most.

The beast howling in front of the castle is huge, a shaggy-haired dog maybe seven feet tall on its haunches, for hunting or herding; Harry’s never been sure. Its eyes are canny and glint in the moonlight. It’s pitch black in colour, because it’s really Harry’s godfather. 

“Sirius, what’re you doing here?” Harry asks shortly. He doesn’t bother to ask how he’s broken in. The shack is protected, these days, but there’ll always be a route through the forest for a dog who’s determined.

Here in the moonlight, the dog’s coat is glossy, thick and neat. It transforms into man who looks much the same, dressed in black and looking like he might well have flown here on a motorbike instead of apparating or taking the floo. “I came to see Buckbeak, not you,” he says rudely, obtuse. “You’re my cover in case someone sees. _Hup,_ ” he commands, tossing his head for Harry to follow and then turning on his heel as though Harry will.

It’s nearly midnight on a Monday, and Harry has the seventh years tomorrow, but what is sleep, really, if not for the dead?

They make their way down past the forest to the paddock, and Harry declines to think it odd that Sirius finds the path so easily. They’re drawing into scenting distance when there’s commotion among the sleeping creatures. An aging grey hippogriff named Witherwings is blustering over the paddock fence – which is really more to keep the students out than the hippogriffs in.

Witherwings caws and Sirius laughs. “Buckbeak, my noblest _steed_ ,” he greets the animal, without irony, bringing them closer. He’s grinning, and he sounds almost surprised, as though he wasn’t expecting to feel as happy as he is to see this creature again.

Buckbeak once more, the hippogriff approaches, and Harry remembers to bow. Sirius doesn’t bother. With another clear screech, Buckbeak tosses his head before butting it, beak and all, into Sirius’s chest.

“Oof.” Sirius rears back, and Harry moves to brace him. “Oh, you beautiful beast,” he goes on anyway, joyful as the hippogriff preens to have its neck stroked, feathers gleaming in the moonlight, even if they are a little thin. “So _stately_.” Sirius seems to have forgotten Harry entirely. “I’m a terrible dog, neglecting you for all these years…”

Cawing, Buckbeak seems to agree, bucking his beak into Sirius’ elbow, making him grin.

“I know, I know… It’s Harry,” he apologises, as though Buckbeak is asking him what’s wrong. “You see,” explains Sirius, turning to Harry, his tone hardening, “I needed support for this conversation.”

“What conversation?” Harry asks, not sure what’s going on.

“I’m very angry with you,” Sirius says, his tone deep and self-mocking, as though it hurts him to be earnest. His skin is pale in the night, his hair like ink, and he looks regal, impossible to disturb. His hand rests on Buckbeak’s neck, still stroking, as though any displeasure he feels will result in Harry being gored.

The hippogriff’s huge eyes clearly see Harry in the dark.

“I’m sorry about that,” Harry says, his tone not giving it away, he expects, how much his heart lurches in his chest, how much his face stings.

Harry’s response nonetheless makes Sirius exhale, sounding frustrated. He rakes hair away from his face. “I have one job, you see,” he goes on, his eyes pits in the moonlight. “If there’s been an attack, I look after the baby.” And Harry knows this already. “I lose my head in the aftermath; I get caught up in thoughts of revenge.” Harry knows this part too. “ _Look after the baby_ ,” he repeats as though he forgets. “Your needs are immediate.”

“I’m not a baby,” Harry points out.

“And I’m not a dog,” Sirius replies, as if to say, _Pull the other one._ “I look after you,” he explains, going over himself. “I give you back to your mum; James recovers from whatever he’s got himself into; we plan the next adventure.”

“See, you’ve mischaracterised me in that scenario.” Harry finds it almost funny, looking at Sirius here on the edge of the forest.

“Bollocks I have,” says Sirius shortly, as Buckbeak caws, dropping his head to work at the grass. “Did you intend for your wand to explode?” Sirius doesn’t give Harry a second to answer. “I saw your face and Malfoy saw what happened; the answer is _no_. So _why_ are you making me fail at my job?”

The moon is round and large tonight, an earthy yellow, and it’s more than enough to see by. It’s the harvest moon, Harry supposes, doing the sums, and he wonders whether it hasn’t sent Sirius insane.

There’ll be a wolf running under the light of this, somewhere, if it hasn’t been locked in a cage. Maybe that’s the reason why. “It’s not my problem that you can’t sleep for worrying about –”

“You would think it _would_ be your problem when your mother and your father and your dearest _beloved_ can’t sleep –”

Harry pulls away from Sirius and Buckbeak, moving into roots where they break up the ground, backing up to a tree, which Harry thinks must be an ash, _Fraxinus excelsior_. He rests a hand on its fissured bark and looks to the branches, hanging low near his head. There are bunches of winged keys, seed pods, not really green but glinting in the moonlight, ready to be caught. This could have been Draco’s tree, Harry thinks, in another world, where he was never torn in two.

It takes a long and slow, steady breath before Sirius speaks again. He’s stepping towards Harry, patting Buckbeak’s near wing as he leaves him to the grass. “I can see that you’re not going to ask,” says Sirius measuredly. “So I’ll tell you. Your dad’s fine.” He’s watching Harry, presumably for a change in expression. “He was fine within the space of a day and he would be laughing, if you were there with him. It takes more than being blown up to put him off; you’ve never understood it, what it meant that someone could…”

 _That someone could kill him,_ he isn’t saying.

“I must have blown him up at _least_ once a year, back in school,” Sirius concludes, as though none of it matters. “We always laughed.”

“It’s the middle of term,” Harry points out, emotion in his chest.

“I don’t need your excuses,” Sirius snaps, raising his hand and raking hair off his face.

Harry steps forward, ready for a fight.

They look at each other, and Harry knows that Sirius must blame him, no matter how much he pretends that he doesn’t. Harry’s childhood is the reason that his dad feels so angry; his wand is the reason he burned. He’s the reason his mum cries, why Moony’s run, lost in the wild, why Sirius is snapping and he’s the reason why Severus Snape and Tom Riddle and Peter Pettigrew and so many others are dead. There’s something wrong with him, right at the core, and whatever was good has long been stripped away.

“My dad’s a better man than me,” Harry tells Sirius, and the words taste bitter on his tongue. He’s not sure why he feels the need express this, but it seems like the right time and place. The truth of it might make Sirius leave him alone. “He stands for things, when I never really stood for anything. Helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies, that was me.” He’s read that phrase somewhere; he uses it in lessons sometimes. “ _Lex talionis._ ”

Brows knitting again, Sirius doesn’t say anything. Buckbeak seems to be digging for a worm.

“Draco did the same and we all did the same, and then I won. Harry Potter, the boy who lived.” He claps his hands together to mark this neat ending, letting it free to the wind.

As though entirely dumbfounded, Sirius laughs. “What _are_ you on about?” he asks simply.

“I’m a violent man, Sirius,” Harry says, no matter that he never says these thoughts aloud. “Rosmerta won’t sell me whiskey, because of the time I laid into Zacharias Smith.” The fucker came to the pub after NEWTs and spent three hours smarming on Ginny. Ginny laughed it off. Harry wrinkles his nose, seeing that smug face in his head. “Bit embarrassing, the whole thing. Made the news. Haven’t seen him since,” he allows. “So that’s likely a result.”

Where was he going with this?

Harry shakes his head, watching Buckbeak dig at the grass, his feathers silver-white in the darkness. “I’m not who everyone says I am and I don’t want to be the person that I know I am, and I don’t know what options are left for me at this point. I thought –”

He has to take a breath, the pain sharp somewhere in his throat. He can imagine a forest, far away from here, and he can feel the sharp chill of raindrops, when tonight the sky is clear.

“I thought that things might change, once the war was over,” Harry finishes. If he stopped fighting, if he stopped drinking, if he stopped trying to be Harry Potter. “But that’s the seasons, innit? You always end up back where you were before.”

Sirius is wrinkling his nose, when Harry looks at him.

“What?” Harry demands.

Shaking his head, Sirius quirks his eyebrows, wry. “Who are you talking to?” he asks.

Harry looks around them, at the way back to the castle and the forest, both eerie in moonlight. There’s the sound of owls hooting, hunting, rustling trees. “I’m talking to you,” he tells Sirius, because there’s no one else here besides Buckbeak, who’s focused on the grass.

“No you’re not,” says Sirius, obtusely. “I’m talking to my godson, and that isn’t you.”

His eyes are dark pits in his face, which is pale and sharp, framed by his hair. “Wow,” Harry tells him, not feeling much of anything. “Well, yeah,” he agrees, looking at whoever this man is. It’s good to have their relation defined, he supposes.

With a sniff, he has to duck his head and wipe one of his eyes, but that doesn’t matter.

Not moving, not opening his mouth, frowning slightly, Sirius watches him.

Words in Harry’s throat make him feel like he’s choking, because he knows why Sirius doesn’t want him anymore. “I’m sorry, all right?” he comes out with. “I’m sorry that I got you killed. I didn’t mean to; I was trying to save you.”

Nothing. Harry’s eyes sting, and he doesn’t know why they have to get into this now. He’s supposed to have moved past this.

“I should have known,” he agrees, taking off his glasses, sniffing while Sirius looks at him. “Everyone told me that he would use the connection – I was so _stupid_. Dumbledore –”

“ _Dumbledore_ –” Sirius interrupts, in the tone that everyone uses these days.

And Harry can’t keep it in anymore. “I loved Dumbledore,” he comes out with, laughing, here in the night. He can’t see very much; he keeps sniffing. His voice sounds awful, low and broken. “He was nice to me and he made me feel special. His eyes used to twinkle and he was like something out of… And now what?” he asks, looking down at the dark grass. “What am I supposed to think?”

“Harry –”

Harry’s not sure that he can see anything. He’s not sure why he’s talking about this. “He was some dirty old man, is that it?” he asks himself, sniffing and looking at grass. “He used me, he broke me and he killed me – that’s what Draco says –”

“ _Draco_ –”

“And I went right along with it. So what was that?” Harry can’t stop wiping fingers into his face. “That must’ve been me, I s’pose, a gay and repressed adolescent, starstruck by his queer old headmaster –”

“I never thought that you were –”

“I should’ve seen all that too – and maybe I did. We both knew the game we were playing.” He laughs again, because this all makes sense now. “We both got something out of it; I practically killed Draco, you know, and all that anyone did –”

He’s hit with something in the chest, then. It’s a warm feeling – but it’s also plainly _Silencio_.

Looking up, Harry finds himself breathing, standing in moonlight, his glasses in his right hand and and his left splayed to express his indignation, his throat moving with no sound as he stares at Sirius in disbelief.

“I got bored,” says Sirius, unrepentant in the dark night. “I’ve never heard such shit, and I’ve known Remus since I was eleven.”

The ash tree is behind Harry, still, its roots under his feet. Wand in hand, Sirius is looking at him with his forehead knit in concern, and it’s difficult to tell his age in the darkness, though he looks broader and taller than when Harry first met him. More like he did after regular meals, though he doesn’t smell of booze right now.

“You should have said,” Sirius tells him unironically.

No sound comes out when Harry tries to complain.

“You realise why we blame Dumbledore,” Sirius goes on, tucking his wand back into his jacket. His tone is short and dry, as though they’re in a cave. “It’s Occam’s razor. It’s easy,” he explains, as though he doesn’t feel badly about it. “The man brought it on himself,” he adds dismissively, “acting omnipotent. Remus loved him too.” Now he smirks. “Never understood it. Never been into beards.” He scratches at the scruff of his own.

With a sharp feeling under his ribs, like flames, Harry breaks through the charm. “I didn’t _fancy_ Dumbledore,” he states plainly.

“I’m glad we’ve cleared that up,” states Sirius, deeply sarcastic.

“It was nice,” Harry tries to explain, frowning. “Knowing that someone had a plan.”

“Your dad’s always been like that,” Sirius points out, nodding.

Wrinkling his nose, Harry uses his wand to vanish the smudges from his glasses. “Everything had always been so terrible,” he says. “And I don’t think that he treated me _badly_. He did his best to keep me good.”

“I think you underestimate yourself,” says Sirius.

Glasses back on his face, Harry looks at Sirius, pale and shadowed in the moonlight. “I never fancied you either, by the way,” he points out.

“I should bloody well hope you never fancied me!” Sirius exclaims, laughing and alive. He looks so young – young enough to be one of Harry’s friends, but he never will be, Harry thinks. He’ll always be Sirius. He pulls hair out of his face.

Harry ducks his head quickly to admit it. “You’ll always be like my dad or my dog or something stupid…”

“I’m everybody’s dog,” says Sirius wickedly, shameless. Buckbeak makes a noise behind him, as though they’ve practised a routine.

Harry resists it. “As for _Moony_ –”

With a twist in his heart, Harry remembers that this is another can of pixies.

Entirely guarded, the grin drops from Sirius’s face. His eyes meet Harry’s.

Yeah, Harry thinks. That’s about right.

“We should have told you,” Sirius acknowledges shortly, his jaw tight.

With a sigh, Harry tries to let it go. He rolls his eyes, shaking his head, sniffing and blinking quickly. “I don’t care,” he decides – and he tries to be reasonable. “It’s not like Ron’s ever told me how long he spent pining for Hermione.”

Sirius gives him a look. “It was a long time, Harry,” he chides. “Did you really never –”

Harry throws up his hands, and a spark of laughter comes out of him. “I was thick, OK?” he points out, and it’s funny, really. “I should’ve guessed about you two…”

“Oh, no you shouldn’t,” Sirius brushes him off, crossing his arms. He sighs, glancing into the forest. “You were young and no one you’ll have known will have talked about men copping off together.” A smirk he can’t contain pulls at his mouth. “Remus and I used to have fun getting away with it.”

“Dumbledore didn’t know until you went to prison,” Harry tells him, in case this hasn’t been mentioned.

Acknowledging the information, Sirius nods. “Not bad for a pair of youths,” he jokes, before snorting, wry. “No wonder he thought that I was in the game too.” He means spying.

“I don’t see why he couldn’t have acted a bit more like my dad,” Harry lets himself say, referring to Moony. “Not my actual dad, but I mean… He could’ve told any of us that he came to find me in the eighties, and he told Dumbledore…” Harry breathes out, quite certain that he’ll always have to think of Dumbledore as two different people.

Is that all right? Harry wonders, because he’s not sure if it’s all right. He keeps doing it with everyone else and it’s driving him insane. He’s not even sure what the difference is between Draco his Draco and Malfoy from school. They’re both as fit as each other, in his head; his memories are all strange and adjusted. Professor Lupin too, with his butterbeer, the flirt.

The butterbeer was him trying to act like an uncle, Harry supposes. It might have been easier if Harry’d ever been taught how to act like a nephew.

Maybe it’s only the forest, Harry thinks, that he can’t forgive Dumbledore for. For the rest of what happened, it makes sense that he was trying to keep him alive. And maybe he knew at the end how much it would hurt, when he met Snape’s dark eyes and realised what was coming. Maybe he regretted it, right at the end, when he felt the feeling Harry can still feel.

There’s nothing left of Dumbledore to grow and change, to tell them his position _now_ , and it was too late to tell anyone on the tower. Harry can believe it, he supposes, if he likes. He can dream.

Sirius is looking up to the sky, the bright harvest moon. “Remus never got on with his parents,” he admits – and this doesn’t seem surprising. “His father couldn’t cope with the situation,” he says, meaning Moony's furry little problem. "So he was off to the continent every other month, only ever back for a week at a time. _Research trips_ ,” describes Sirius scathingly. “He wrote books about the dark creatures of Europe.”

A name surfaces in Harry’s mind. “Lyall Lupin,” he remembers. His books have never been as popular as Lockhart’s series, but they’re a lot more accurate. A bit outdated these days. “That’s –”

“That’s him,” Sirius confirms, his tone very dry. “The trips became longer after we started at Hogwarts. By the end of sixth year it was clear that he was never coming home, but no one knows what happened to him. His poor wife,” Sirius goes on, “Remus’s mother, was left with a house that she couldn’t afford and a son who resented her for all the years she’d spent locking him up in the cellar.”

Harry startles at this, and Sirius smiles sadly, as though he understands, before he looks up at the moon again.

“Remus used to dread becoming either one of them,” he concludes.

There’s a very sad irony to this, Harry thinks, though he can’t believe that Moony would _blame_ himself for the Dursleys…

Not dwelling on that idea, Harry returns to his point. “But he was with you –”

“When I wasn’t in prison,” Sirius allows, his expression guarded.

“And you were always my godfather. So it was always going to be…” Harry sighs, looking back to the castle, and there’s no way around what he wants to say. “But it doesn’t work,” he says, frustrated, glancing at Sirius, who’s still looking sympathetic. “I can’t see him like that. You’re like my dad, so he should be my other dad, but he never really was, and now he’s so _fit_ …”

For a moment, there’s silence, and Harry feels his face turning red.

With a snort, then, Sirius starts sniggering, here by the forest in the dark.

“Oh, stop it,” Harry tells him, embarrassed, even as he feels a smirk pulling at his mouth.

“Sorry,” Sirius doesn’t apologise, grinning now. “I agree, obviously,” he says awfully, giving Harry a look. “It’s…” He rolls his eyes, before explaining, “He had so many scars, and there used to be so much… _Lycophobia_ ,” he says, as though he’s only recently learned the word. Most likely from a crossword. “I’ve never known anyone else who’s admitted it.”

“That’s not true,” Harry points out, waving a hand at him. “You knew Tonks.”

Rearing up, Sirius scoffs. “Well, no one _told_ me that she…” He’s talking to the air, gesturing uselessly. It’s difficult to argue with the dead, Harry thinks. “If I’d been aware, I would have been very nice, but I would have explained that I saw him first and she could keep her hands _off_.”

It’s the way that Gryffindor decides things, Harry supposes. The problem is that Tonks was a Hufflepuff, so she’d likely have suggested something fair, that they should let Moony choose. The idea makes Harry laugh, which feels unkind, though he knows that Draco would say it’s because the idea is absurd.

Going with the joke, Sirius points at him. “And _you_ , Potter,” he says, sounding very much like Draco, even as he smirks. “You can keep your hands off too.” He mutters to himself, “Bloody gannets, the younger generation…”

“But what if thinking _he’s_ fit makes me think that _you’re_ fit, and then…”

These thoughts don’t make sense, Harry realises, as they come out of him. And yet –

Sirius looks at him. He seems to have caught on. He pushes hair out of his face, and he’s so _kind_ , the way he looks at him. “Harry,” he says, like a father or a dog or something, “my relationship with you was set in stone from the moment you appeared in this world. It’s not going to change. As we’ve established, besides,” he adds as a joke, pressing a hand to his chest, “I have _Remus_.” Whatever that means, Harry supposes.

There’s no reply to this, in any case. Harry wrinkles his nose, remembering the mess that his godfather gets himself into when he’s flirting. “He’s broken your heart,” he finds himself saying, a flint-spark of hard anger inside him at the thought.

Looking at him, Sirius laughs, as though it’s funny – the idea that anyone might want to protect him. “My heart was made to be broken,” he says dismissively, as though it doesn’t matter.

It makes him sound like Draco, and they both have unicorn cores. It makes Harry look solidly back at him. "And Teddy’s?" he pushes.

There’s something in Sirius’s face, lit by the moon. His expression turns hopeless, because he has no reply, but it’s more than that. It’s the same thing that Draco gets when he’s occluding something, Harry realises, or when he’s more consciously lying, and it’s obvious to Harry because certain angles of their faces are the same.

“He’ll come home eventually,” Sirius goes on like a dog, and it’s a tell, it’s a clue. He’s shrugging, uncomfortable with the silence. “Until then, we wait. That’s all that we can do.”

Harry hates being lied to; he can admit it.

“Harry?” Sirius asks him, looking confused.

“You know something,” Harry tells him, biting down on his teeth. His whole life is secrets, he thinks. He thinks that he hates them. Magic and secrets, his own breath and blood.

“The fuck do I know; I know fuck all,” scoffs Sirius, lying, looking away.

And Harry’s instinct is to push it. He’s sure that he should push it.

But then, he thinks, what if this is one of those moments when he shouldn’t? He doesn’t know how to recognise them – he never did. He –

The silence is tense, long, and Harry feels like he’s choking. It’s a battle of wills inside his own heart, and Harry can’t bear the thought of things going the wrong way.

“I need to get some sleep,” Harry tells his godfather, in the end, looking up at the moon and wondering how many secrets Remus Lupin ever had. The strength of character that it would take to push him on all of them. Before Azkaban, before the war, he can imagine that Sirius was exactly that person. Harry himself might have been, once upon a time. “I’ll see you,” he suggests, though it might well be a lie.

Sirius is frowning, but he doesn’t complain, looking torn. He pulls Harry into a warm hug before he leaves and ruffles his hair. Harry lets him, growing used to the strength of his godfather's arms in this different decade. “Come home one of these days,” he suggests, his anger faded from when he arrived.

* * *

Friday is Hermione’s birthday, and Harry doesn’t mean to avoid it, but he does. It’s the first time since they were eleven, he thinks, that he hasn’t seen her for it, and it gives him an inkling that there might be something wrong with him. In 1998 he forgot the day and he forgot to buy her a present, but she and Ron snuck out to Hogsmeade and apparated in pops to Grimmo for the evening.

Looking back, it seems clear that this wasn’t because they missed their best friend, but rather because they wanted to spend the night in their own private bedroom. But Harry was a virgin at that point, entirely myopic, so he never caught on.

He goes to Teddy’s on Saturday, then back to Hogwarts, and he sees the stag again on a run, Sunday morning. It’s trotting through the woods, matching Harry’s pace as his trainers crunch on autumn’s first leaves, as his breath comes roughly, as he ducks out of the way of low branches.

Eventually the stag turns to take a different direction, but it’s about to head towards the acromantulae, so Harry has to sprint and shout, “No, not that way!” It’s instinct; he can’t bear the thought –

He casts sparks and the stag doesn’t startle like it should, instead reeling and bleating and ducking its head as though it means to charge, toeing the ground.

“There are _spiders_ ,” Harry tells it, his breath heavy and his muscles pounding now he’s not running. “I’m not trying to _hurt_ you.”

The stag looks up at him solidly.

Breathing, Harry’s not thinking. “Look, you’re lost. This’ll show you to the mountains,” Harry insists, and he whips his wand to cast a stag of his own.

It doesn’t come. Again, it doesn’t come. For ten years it hasn’t come, Harry remembers; it would only the be the wolf, but even then –

“ _Expecto patronum,_ ” Harry casts, disbelieving, his voice cracking as he feels the tears come to his eyes.

Nothing.

He thought… It’s been a better week. “ _EXPECTO PATRONUM._ ”

Nothing.

“Expecto _fucking_ patronum, you stupid _fucking_ …”

Harry doesn’t expect this to work, and he loses it slightly, heaving a harsh breath from his hand and casting _Confringo_ at the forest floor, exploding flames which are intended entirely to burn. They run around Harry in a perfect circle, flashing in a spiral, searing the ground and flaring high in a rush of yellow-orange-red into smoke, quick and hot, gone in seconds.

The stag watches him.

There’s the sound of more hooves, cutting an easy trot through roots and leaves, and then there’s Firenze, not reverent but telling him off. “What is the meaning of this?”

“I’m sorry, all right?” Harry tells him, looking up at his fierce blue eyes, his blond hair, golden with the morning. He’s struck by a feeling of stomach-deep loneliness.

“Explain this disturbance,” the centaur demands, meaning both the _Confringo_ and the earlier sparks.

“He was going to get eaten by the spiders,” Harry insists, pointing his wand at the stag, who’s still watching.

This doesn’t seem to be an acceptable explanation. “You are a kind wizard, Harry Potter,” Firenze tells him, too tall, surely lying. “But the forest is not yours to rule.”

“I’ll just put my blinkers on, shall I?” Harry suggests, gesturing at the side of his face, knowing that he’s being rude, not intending to use offensive terminology. “Never look anywhere but forward.”

“You are here to run,” Firenze suggests, tolerant like the teacher he’s become. “So run.”

Flaring his nostrils as he breathes, Harry looks down at his laces to check them, blinks tears from his eyes, and then he starts running again.

The stag follows him. Harry can see it from the corner of his eye. It follows him on Monday and on Tuesday and on Wednesday Harry pauses at the edge of the forest, the end of his route. He turns back to look at it, watching kindly from the trees, its head noble and high.

“You don’t have to follow me, you know,” he points out. “I don’t need…”

The stag doesn’t move.

“I know who you are,” Harry points out. He sent his mother a map.

The stag ducks its head, as though it’s interested in the grass. The performance makes Harry snort.

“You should talk to Draco,” Harry points out, and the stag looks up again. “He used to do this all the time. He’d turn up in places –”

Harry swallows when the longing kicks in. The first night that Hermione brought him to dinner at Grimmo, unexpectedly, Harry only remembers that he’d been having a bad day

(“I, ah, like what you must have done with the décor.”

“Oh, don’t,” said Hermione, taking this insincere flattery as a joke. “It looks like a conference hotel on the outskirts of I don’t know where. These two were useless, needless to say.”

“I think it looks great,” said Ron defensively, telling the truth.

“Yeah,” agreed Harry, not sure what they were talking about.

“Mm,” agreed Draco, with a glance of bright eyes. “Well – I brought wine. It’s muggle, not elven, but it’s very good.” He caught himself. “I suppose that you don’t mind?”

“No,” said Hermione simply, with a smile. “Harry – you should show Draco the cellar.” She explained, “Harry’s inherited racks of muggle wine; you might be able to make something of it.”

“Yeah,” agreed Harry, not sure what what they were talking about, but he took Draco down to the cellar.

“This… This is remarkable –” Draco was crouched to the floor, his gaze intent and alight, his fingers all over cases of wine, in the dust, brushing it away. “You don’t understand; I’ve been on courses; my father hated…” He was laughing, incredulous, something new. “They put these châteaux on the test.”

He was beautiful like a fractal, Harry thought, his fingers his elbows his whole body, his expression his laughter the feeling in Harry’s heart.

“Yeah,” is all Harry said. “Stand up,” he suggested, because he was in love with him.).

The stag has ducked its head to the grass, nosing something, and maybe it isn’t, Harry thinks. Maybe it isn’t –

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” Harry asks, out of weakness.

The stag doesn’t tell him anything, which seems fair. Harry nods, blinking the sting from his eyes.

“I’ll see you later,” he says, before jogging up to the castle for breakfast.

He apologises to Neville that lunchtime, for bringing up Neville’s feelings for Ginny only after she was married, too late.

“Don’t fuss about it,” Neville says, waving a hand, and it’s maddening in the loud, busy hall. “To be honest,” he admits evenly, “I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted anything from her. She’s just one of those women, you know?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, because maybe he does. “Maybe,” he goes on, because that feels important. “I dunno, mate,” he says, shaking his head over his pumpkin juice. He’s chosen the vegetarian option today, a Spanish omelette, because he only has the roast out of habit. “I’ve been obsessed with Malfoy for more than a decade, I reckon.” It doesn’t seem odd to talk about him, now he’s started. “Best turn-out in the world, when something happened.”

“Oh, things’ve _happened_ ,” Neville says, not commenting on Harry’s Malfoy obsession. Maybe everyone already knows. As for Neville and Ginny, this is the first word that Harry’s heard about it. It’s odd; the world skews. It’s a relief; he used to imagine Neville pining. “Never went anywhere. It was strange. Made me feel off. Guilty, I’d say.”

“Not because of _me_ –” Harry interrupts.

Neville gives him a mocking look. “Not _all_ because of you, Haz, you egotist.”

This makes Harry laugh, and he thinks he sees McGonagall look at him from further down the table.

“I used to feel like I was clipping her wings,” Neville goes on. “That year we spent running Dumbledore’s Army…” They always remember this with irony. “I didn’t want to taint that. I used to think about the papers, and how the story’d move to being the story of Nev’n’his girlfriend, rather than the three of us, with names.”

“I dunno, Nev,” Harry tells Neville again. “I worry all the time about the papers going for Draco.” It _does_ feel odd to call Draco Draco here with Neville; Harry’s tongue ties. He forces himself on. “I used to feel guilty about all sorts of stuff.” Among other things. “But it was _Malfoy_ ,” he entirely fails to explain, and he uses the surname because that was what used to bite in his head.

Neville nods anyway, as though he understands. “See, that’s how you know,” he says easily, like Neville.

He’s most likely right. “There’s someone out there for you,” Harry says because he believes it.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Neville says solidly, truthful. “I’m smug as a niffler in a gold mine, with my life. I see my great love every day.” He’s talking about plants, and it makes Harry roll his eyes, before they’re laughing.

On Thursday and Friday, the stag follows Harry. He talks to it about Neville’s love of plants and his own lack of love for anything besides Teddy, after the war.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” he explains. “I’d had a fixed point of focus for years. I wanted to grow up and move on, I think, but it was like no one would let me. _Now_ they all decided, _now_ I was too young.” It makes him laugh bitterly. “I was the boy who lived and I was living. I was taking NEWTs and getting drunk, so yeah, yeah, everything’s great now, innit? I’d killed a man dead,” Harry explains, while the stag investigates the base of a pine tree, “and no one would accept that this meant anything. And maybe it didn’t – maybe I _was_ still young, maybe I always was, but it wasn’t _helpful_ …”

It’s easy to trust the stag, Harry finds. He knows it’s not really a stag – almost for certain – but it makes clear at the end of Harry’s run, when it’s nosing the grass, that this is how it expects Harry to treat it. Even if his instinct’s wrong, it’s saying – if it’s saying anything – he shouldn’t let that matter.

On Friday he talks for so long that he’s late to his first lesson. He catches two Gryffindor third years trying to sneak a dungbomb into his desk. They’ve decided they’re too old for starry-eyed wonder after conquering boggarts. They’ve moved on to the hazing. Harry passes the test every year and he passes it this time, with a pair of swift detentions.

* * *

Harry’s mum keeps sending him letters. That Friday night, after a whiskey, he opens one, dreading its questions after his well-being, the pressure of its insistence that everyone’s worried. The confirmation that his dad’s told her everything, and she thinks –

– but it isn’t that. It’s just his mum, being herself, as though nothing’s changed. The letter sounds as though it follows at least one of the others.

> _Dear Harry the owl,_
> 
> _I was talking to your Draco about Professor Snape again this morning. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it, the expectations he put on you – and on himself! The boy I knew would never have believed that someone else could redeem him, or that redemption was possible. He was cynical down to his bones. He set you both an impossible task, I think._
> 
> _He wants redemption himself, your Draco, but he’s not cynical, is he? He only plays it at weekends. And I think he knows deep down that he was powerless for a lot of the war. He wants Professor Snape to have done what he wishes that he could. That’s an even more impossible task, I told him, trying to change what’s been done. He told me that I didn’t have a leg to stand on, or words to that effect – cheeky beggar! And then he went on, Padfoot-like, about Transfiguration, and you’ll have to forgive me that I didn’t understand a word of it…_
> 
> _He doesn’t realise what makes him special, I think, and that he isn’t your Professor Snape – even when he’s saying that he isn’t._
> 
> _He’s a bit like your dad in that way, I reckon. He doesn’t realise that most people aren’t as self-assured as he is. We should talk about that, because it’s an attractive trait, isn’t it? (– your mother says, winking; I’m terrible!) But it can make some things difficult to explain, I’ve always found._
> 
> _He’s good to talk to, your Draco; a good listener – not that I need to tell you that, I’m sure. He helped me figure out a few things. He got a bit angry with me at one point, but he’s very sensitive – I won’t need to tell you that either! – so that was likely inevitable. I’ve patched things up for now, I think. We have coffee most mornings, so I’ll be back to see him tomorrow, don’t worry._
> 
> _Not much else has been happening, I think it’s fair to say. Only the usual! Your dad needs a job, but I haven’t found him one yet. He’s been taking your Uncle Padfoot for walks, at least. The date’s come through for Ron’s auror test – and wouldn’t that be nice, if he could get it before the wedding? The baby's healthy, and Hermione's a trooper, as you know. Hope you’ve been having a good week; speak again soon._
> 
> _Lots of love,_
> 
> _Your mom Lily xx_

Stomach turning with embarrassment, Harry lets go of the letter when he gets to the end. He stands up from his desk and goes for a walk around the castle. He doesn’t find the Mirror of Erised, but when he comes back the letter is still there, impossible, and he reads it again, a third time. No one stops him; no one interrupts him. In the end, it’s only sleep that takes him, and he wakes up with his chin on his chest, the letter secure in his hands.

Setting it down, Harry turns to Puff, who’s watching him, or sleeping himself, perched on the bookcase and hoarding the other sealed folds of parchment. He forces himself to get up and brush his teeth and climb into bed, the letter not returned to hiding, but left casually on the desk for anyone to find.

* * *

It’s Saturday again the next morning. Teddy’s bounced back, now that September’s coming to an end. He’s been surly and Harry’s been playing Xbox with him, mutely, which has suited Harry fine. This week, he’s biking again, and Harry knows better than to say anything that might rock the boat, even as his heart sinks. He forgets, sometimes, that Teddy has to grow up.

Harry stays into the afternoon anyway, though he finds that he has little to say to Andromeda. He’d like to fix that somehow, but their different opinions on Moony’s disappearance are an erumpent in the room, waiting to explode.

At around four o’clock, he goes for a walk.

Two roads into town is the skate park. There are clouds rolling in, looking like rain, and Harry sees how this makes Teddy and his mates reluctant to stay out much longer. They’re holding a conference, when he passes them by.

“I don’t wanna go home,” Teddy’s saying, his voice high and clear.

It’s immediate, the feeling Harry feels. He’s struck sharply through the chest, stunned by the emotion that his godson seems to be trying to convey, its complexity. His voice lilts somewhere that Harry’s never heard before, as though he feels trapped by circumstance.

Passing by, Harry pauses at a council-funded noticeboard. It’s stood by the road opposite the park and he pretends that he’s reading the posters, which are hidden behind glass.

One of the other children sighs, and Harry’s imagines that it’s AJ. He’s older than Teddy by half a year, but that doesn’t matter much anymore. He’s the best at most subjects in the school, and these days the children all know it – Teddy too – and that does. “Come back to ours,” he’s suggesting with intelligent compassion, trying to fix a rift that he doesn’t understand. His brother Max says something in support. “Mum won’t mind,” AJ goes on. “It’s cold.”

This is true. The temperature’s dropped in the last few days, and it doesn’t feel much like summer anymore.

“Yeah; _we’re_ all going home?” one of the girls says, sounding like she’s speaking for the group of them. Harry can imagine that voice at twenty-five, telling some blokes in a pub none-too-subtly that they’ve been boring, which means that they’ve failed in their job.

“A’ight,” Teddy declares, sounding frustrated but as though he’s going to hold in his tantrum. “Whatever,” he adds, and Harry thinks that this is because he wants to sound cool.

Ducking his head to the noticeboard, Harry’s prepares to be caught – but he isn’t. The kids take to their bikes and flood into the road and the girls all go off another way.

Harry’s not sure why his eyes are stinging, after this. He passes by the skate park into the sports field, and he imagines that at Teddy’s age he would have been here, if he’d had any friends, playing football.

He’s naturally talented at football, something no one ever told him. He found out a few years back, when Teddy first made friends with AJ and he and Annie used to bring the boys to play.

At the edge of the field, near the wooden fence of the playground, there’s a bench. Harry sits down here and crosses his arms against the chill in the air, the cool spike of damp that feels like rain.

He doesn’t think of much at all. He smells the grass, he looks around at suburbia, and he wonders if this is where he’s always belonged. His mistake was ever trying to escape it.

A while later, a woman sits down next to him, two feet of bench there between them, a tag of carved graffiti. There’s a swirl of dark hair on top of her head and she’s wearing a long, crisp black coat with a deep collar of what must be fake fur. She’s wearing pointed leather shoes and it seems to take her two seconds flat to pull a cigarette from somewhere and light it.

She looks out of place, but Harry only pays her a glance. This is Essex, after all; it’s not Surrey. There are all sorts round here.

“I’m allowed one pack while I’m away,” she defends herself, as though Harry’s judging her. He glances again, and she’s breathing out as though experiencing release. She shakes the packet of cigarettes in question. “Can’t poison the kiddies,” she seems to joke, leaning slightly towards him, and it’s true that the cardboard packet is threatening that this is a risk.

“Mm,” Harry offers noncommittally, turning back to the sports field, not sure why this woman is here.

At least until she tuts at him. There’s a heavy, pregnant pause, and then she seems to run out of patience. “Well, this is depressing, Harry Potter,” she says, and Harry jumps to realise that she’s a witch. She sounds like a wizard he knows. “Is this the sort of place you grew up?”

Harry looks at her, and she meets his gaze with a smirk that’s only visible in her eyes, which are shadowed dark and gleaming with kohl. Her nose is turned up like a pug’s.

He blinks, taking her in. Her figure’s curvier than it used to be. She looks poised and sophisticated, and there’s humour in her expression that he might finally understand. “Pansy Parkinson,” he realises.

She flashes perfect teeth and takes another drag. “Pansy von _Herrschenberg_ ,” she corrects, holding out her hand as though she wants Harry to kiss it. “Delighted. I believe that we have someone in common?”


	14. An adventure, part 3

On a bench in a park in the Greater London Metropolitan Area, Harry looks at the witch dressed in black sitting next to him. They hated each other in school.

“Pansy –” It doesn’t work, Harry finds, to exclaim her new last name.

She looks at him smugly, her face framed by hair and fur, her eyes by smoky shadow.

“I thought that you were in New York,” Harry tells her instead, trying to put her off.

Pansy von Herrschenberg sighs. “Do you know your boyfriend at _all?_ ” she asks, completely ignoring this cue and making Harry startle, blinking her huge dark eyes and their eyelashes – and Harry knows it’s all make-up, but it’s mesmerising. “He came out of the womb needlessly dramatic.” And Harry agrees that this is _true_. “It is by no means out of character for him to spend ten years ignoring me, only to send me a letter three feet long detailing how he is heartbroken, pathetic, a traitor to Salazar and so _sorry_ , Pansy, so dreadfully, dreadfully _sorry_ …”

She takes another drag on her cigarette, rolling her eyes.

“For a moment I thought that he was coming out to me as straight. Confessing his love.” She mocks a shudder at the thought. “Gave me quite the funny turn in my sitting room. Thankfully,” she adds, with a witty twitch of her head, “he didn’t and he wasn’t, and what I learned instead is that _Harry Potter_ has left him _for his own good_.”

The expression on her face is so utterly disbelieving that Harry’s not sure what to do with it.

“The situation is preposterous and evidently stressful,” she says in a reproving tone. “I’ve come to scoop you up and present you for ten years of missed birthdays. A few Christmases, maybe, depending on how prettily you beg for forgiveness.”

She hasn’t seen Draco yet, is all Harry gets from this.

“I’ve been lurking in this awful place for a week,” she complains, and Harry doesn’t know how she’d known that he’d be here.

“Not your first packet of fags, then,” he manages to joke.

Pansy von Herrschenberg looks outraged by this accusation, but Harry suspects that she might be amused. “Potter, you excel yourself,” she tells him sharply, tucking whatever packet it is into a small leather handbag, quilted with a clasp of interlinked Cs.

She almost makes him laugh.

“Are you trying to protect him?” she mocks, and Harry feels his grin fade. “Stop being a hero,” she suggests abruptly, looking at him. Harry’s certain that this isn’t what he’s been doing. “Go home once in a while, keep him in treats like a sausage dog and just fuck him, for fuck’s sake. That’s everything he wants, and I have no doubt that he makes a good fuck.”

There’s no way that Harry can reply to his. He tries not to let his face go red. “There’s a lot more going on,” he ends up coming out with, ignoring everything but the most general point. “And he doesn’t –”

“Yes, yes,” Pansy says, waving a hand which glints with diamonds and what might be platinum, sucking on her cigarette with the other. Harry thinks that he might be hallucinating. “He’s going to be Minister for Magic one day…” Her eyes are wide with exasperation. “A celebrity potioneer to beat Snape at his own game – on the quidditch team for England or a dragon keeper… I’ve heard it all before,” she says sweetly.

This doesn’t seem fair. “He works for the Department of Mysteries –”

“Playing second string to _Granger_ ,” agrees Pansy, as though this is terribly boring. “A pastime,” she insists. “He likes being made to feel inferior; it’s a dirty little kink.” She finishes emphatically, “It is not the end goal.”

He bought Harry’s parents back to life, Harry thinks indignantly. “He should be famous,” he insists, because no one will _listen_.

“It’s a hard life,” Pansy tells him, with no irony. “Look at me; I’ve been replaced by Loony Lovegood.”

This is going nowhere. “I’m not going back with you,” Harry tells her shortly, shifting on the bench. “I dunno what you’re doing here. And don’t call Luna _Loony_.”

“Of course you’re coming back with me,” Pansy tells him, without a single false note of doubt, smugly taking a drag. “And I’m sorry, but I don’t hear the difference between the two words you’re saying…” She smiles and Harry rolls her eyes. “I’m here to collect you,” she insists. “You’re going to apparate me to the front step like a gentleman, or else to the hallway like a rogue.”

She winks at him, and Harry’s not sure what the joke is.

“If you really want to do things properly,” she finishes, “you’ll take me to Draco’s dear Aunt Andromeda and she can chaperone us both through the floo.”

“Draco’s missed you for years,” Harry tells her, not meaning to sound so accusing. But she is being ridiculous.

“Ugh,” says Pansy immediately, shuddering theatrically and sucking on her cigarette. “Never has that darling name sounded so common. _Draco_ ,” she repeats in a nasty, swallowed mockney accent. “You’re sounding out the name of my second son,” she complains, and this is the most ridiculous thing that Harry’s ever heard. “Show some respect. Honestly,” she pushes, scoffing. “What do you call him in bed?”

Now, Harry realises that she’s trying to put him off the point, but he still doesn’t know what to do but laugh incredulously. As if he’s going to talk about that with her.

“I’m not sure I dare think about it,” Pansy goes on, making a face, and Harry keeps laughing despite himself, because this encounter is surreal. There’s a moment, and then a thought seems to strike her. She turns back to Harry, holding up her palm and schooling her face.

Harry waits, bemused. He pushes his glasses up his nose.

With clear and serious purpose, Pansy meets his eyes. Hers are large and expressive, shadowed with kohl, somewhere between brown and deep blue. “Tell me that that you don’t joke about disarming him,” she says. “ _Not_ while you’re sucking his cock.”

It takes a few moments for these words to sink in, the point about _Expelliarmus_ , Harry’s signature. Spluttering then, Harry knows that he’s turning bright red, and maybe he’s never turned red in his life, because this feels as though he’s exploding. “ _No_ ,” he comes out with –

With a slap of her hand to her expensive coat, Pansy shrieks, a grin breaking open her face as a wicked laugh clangs down her nose. It’s not a nice sound, but it’s oddly genuine, and Harry’s not sure what to make of it. “Oh Potter, you’re too easy,” she declares, and Harry would believe that she felt no real emotions at all.

Shaking his head, Harry tries not to think about – “It won’t solve anything,” is what he lands on. “Throwing me down on a rug like a mouse –”

“Yes, but it’s a _start_ ,” Pansy interrupts, and her cheeks are flushed when Harry looks at her. “You’ll make a lovely mouse.” She switches tack, ducking her chin to her shoulder, into fur. “You can throw me down too,” she suggests, batting her lashes, and she makes it sound like innuendo.

“I can’t,” Harry decides, shaking his head, looking off down the sports field, pressing his hands between his knees. He can’t go back to Grimmo; he can’t even imagine it. He thinks that he feels a drop of rain on his wrist, but that might be the wind.

Two feet away from him, Pansy von Herrschenberg sighs. “Well, then, you’ll have to come with me to my hotel,” she concludes. “I’m not sitting here all afternoon. The rain will damage foxy woxy.”

Harry looks at her. She’s stroking the collar of her coat and pouting at him. So much for assuming that the fur was fake.

“I’m not coming back to your –”

“Oh, don’t be such a _Potter_ ,” she dismisses, as though Harry was suggesting something. “I’m not alone; my virtue’s not at risk; I have help.”

A definite drop of rain falls on the back of Harry’s neck. “What are you on about?” he asks as he wipes it away.

Pansy sighs, looking at him as though he both obtuse and extremely boring. “My _babies_ , Potter,” she says, as though Harry was supposed to have guessed this. “Draco’s only eleven months and I’ve left him for hours already.”

“You brought them with you?” Harry asks stupidly. “From America?”

And Pansy makes another face, looking around the sports field for an audience. “Take my arm,” she suggests, standing up, pulling a wand from somewhere inside her coat. She looks him up and down sceptically. “Try to act expensive for the lobby.”

He’s been told this before, Harry thinks with a sigh.

* * *

As for Pansy’s hotel, it turns out that she’s staying in a suite. It is approximately the size of Malfoy’s flat. Or else at least the kitchen.

The main room is a lounge, with views looking out over what might be Hyde Park. Mandragora, the nanny, who Harry has been told is a squib, is in the middle of quite a lot when they arrive: she seems to be teaching Latin to Pansy’s very solemn elder, maybe five-year-old son in front of a huge television (turned off), no matter that she’s sat on the floor and has her arms full of baby Draco, who is _bawling_ , red with tears and shrieking like murder.

“Oh Mandy, has he been like this long?” Pansy cries as they enter the room, crossing the carpeted floor to pick up the baby and promise that she's here, she's here – and the shrieks are the child saying _Mama_ , Harry realises, almost _Mummy_.

There’s a brief exchange when things have calmed down, from which Harry gathers that the older boy goes by Alfie. He’s introduced as Nebuchadnezzar von Herrschenberg the thirteenth. Harry supposes that Alfred might be a middle name. He’s not sure how to cope with the idea that there have been twelve other Nebuchadnezzar von Herrschenbergs in the world, though he’s struck by the desire to watch Draco keep a straight face when he hears.

He shakes the boy’s hand anyway, introducing himself as Harry Potter. Mandragora nods politely, as though she hasn’t heard of the name but is delighted to meet him – only then little Alfie looks him in the eye and asks in a strange not-quite American accent, “Did you really defeat the Dark Lord, Mr Potter?”

“Oh, er.” This is a question Harry’s never been asked. It’s been ten years, he supposes. “Well,” he decides. “It was a group effort, really –”

“It’s Professor Potter, Alfie,” Pansy corrects from behind him.

Turning around, Harry is immediately startled, blushing, to see that Pansy has undone the front wrap of her dress – black silk, inevitably – unclasped the front of her bra – black lace – and is currently displaying one large round breast like a woman in a painting, at least until the baby latches on, much less red than when they arrived.

“Er…”

Pansy’s curvy figure isn’t Harry’s type, if it could be said that he has one, but she’s frowning down lovingly at a baby – whose hair is black, to make it worse – when not five minutes ago she was being scathing and rude. It’s the contradiction, he thinks, that he finds himself flustered by.

She doesn’t look like a painting, Harry tells himself. She’s not writhing or jumping or trying to cover herself up; she’s sitting on an elegant settee with her ankles crossed. The baby covers most of her front.

“Do stop staring,” Pansy tells him, making Harry jump guiltily to look at her face. Behind him, Mandragora seems to be taking Alfie back to his Latin, inasmuch as it sounds like spells or trees. “It’s terrible,” Pansy goes on, undisturbed by the baby pawing at her. “He was weaned before we came out here. I blame you,” she says, and for a moment it feels like she’s telling Harry that he’s the child’s father. She’s taking hold of a tiny hand in her own, then smoothing back tufty hair. “There, there, Draco; Mummy’s here.”

Forcing his eyes to drift to the wall, Harry’s not sure that he isn’t in a dream. There’s another Draco, isn’t there?

“You’re allowed to laugh, Potter,” says Pansy eventually, and Harry’s not sure if he knows how. She’s giving him a sly look, shifting the baby in her arms. He seems oddly big to be doing this – he’s dressed in clothes – but Harry supposes that Teddy wasn’t finished with milk by his first birthday either. “I knew when I gave him the name that this part would be highly amusing. I’ve grown used to it,” she laments, looking down fondly. “You’ll have to make the gags for me.”

“Gags?” Harry asks, looking anywhere else.

“Sit down,” Pansy instructs, nodding to the settee opposite her, and Harry wonders what it feels like, nursing life. He risks another look and both mother and child seem content, engaged in a practical exchange. “If you insist on having a purpose, you can order us afternoon tea – for four,” she says, including Alfie. “Or whatever you like; the phone’s on the desk and the menu’s right there.” She nods to the coffee table. “Give them von Herrschenberg.” She means as the name.

In a moment, Harry recalls that London only boasts a single all-wizarding five-star hotel, and this can’t be it because they’re much too high up.

“Right,” he says, trying not to make a fuss.

It’s up to Harry to receive the food, when it arrives. Pansy goes to change baby Draco in the bedroom, cast cleaning spells on her clothes, Harry supposes. Alfie is finishing a worksheet at the dining table and Mandragora is looking over his shoulder, saying _hmm_. Harry gets the impression that changing Draco might be below Mandragora’s pay grade, and that Pansy might have behaved improperly by making her babysit earlier.

There’s a power struggle before Pansy goes, because it’s time to put Draco down for sleep. It seems early to Harry, but he supposes that there might be an issue with jetlag. Maybe it’s a nap.

“Can’t I cuddle him for a bit?” Pansy asks, complaining. She pouts like a child, dressed in a bra and unrevealing stretchy knickers like cycle shorts or the tight things Harry’s Draco wears, her dress open like a robe, clean curves and cleavage. She’s holding the baby like she loves him. She’s not Harry’s type, but he’s sure he’s not gay, in the moment it takes for his gaze to bounce to the ceiling and his cheeks to grow warm.

Mandragora doesn’t quite say no, as it is. “It’s four forty-five,” she observes instead, making a gesture which isn’t a shrug, which nonetheless suggests that there could be dire consequences.

“The tyranny of routine,” Pansy describes it to Harry, huffing even as she sweeps to the bedroom.

She comes out while Harry is finishing directing the two blokes from room service where to put all the cake and sandwiches and scones. There was a long spiel about the different sandwiches, which Harry has promptly forgotten. They said something about rosewater and lychees for one of the cakes and all sorts of things about the tea. It’s led Harry to the conclusion, as usual, that being posh is confusing, but he’s split the delivery between the coffee table and the dining table in the corner, because he can’t imagine that they’ll all sit down together, and it’s the sort of thing that Kreacher would do.

Harry’s not sure if he should feel bad for expecting this, but as expected, Alfie and Mandragora sit easily at the dining table and begin some sort of memory game about fruits. _Lychee_ is the first to go in.

Deciding that the only thing to do is go with it all – and that there won’t be many occasions for him to try out room-service afternoon tea in a top-flight London hotel – Harry sits down and goes straight for the lychee cake, because it sounded interesting. It’s very nice. He ends up pouring Pansy’s tea as well as his own, because it’s sitting there not being drunk.

“You could’ve come to the memorial, you know,” Harry points out. McGonagall’s line about the invitations returns to his head. “Draco came; you could’ve used the excuse.”

“The memorial I heard about from Story Greengrass?” Pansy suggests, scoffing as she slops some milk into her tea and stirs. “To which I would have been invited as _Miss Parkinson_ , even if they’d bothered to locate my address? Please,” she insists, as though this was never her name. “Can you imagine the fuss it would have caused if any of us had turned up? If Draco hadn’t been on your arm…”

This suggestion makes Harry pause, tea at his chin. He glances to meet Pansy’s hazel eyes, surrounded by black. It strikes him that her colouring is a lot like his dad’s, though she’s made up to be paler, and he has to breathe harshly for a moment to control himself.

As for Pansy, she blinks. “You took him back to that place under your aegis, yes?”

“I didn’t know that he was coming,” Harry fails to defend himself, looking past her shoulder to the warm, smart colours of the room. He can see his Draco, not the baby, small in the corner of Hogwarts' great hall, clinging to the panelling. “He came with Luna and Ollivander.”

“ _Ollivander?_ ” Pansy exclaims, chinking her teacup to the saucer. “What, as Loony’s –?”

There’s a pause in chatter from the boy and Mandragora in the corner, here in the hotel living room.

Harry looks at them, at Pansy’s guilty face, and keeps his voice low, leaning forward. “There was a thing when Ollivander was being held captive…”

“So he’s good enough to accompany the Dark Lord’s hostages, you’re saying,” Pansy hisses at him, as the chatter starts back up, “but when it comes to the saviour of the wizarding world –”

“I was there in an official capacity,” Harry finishes, frowning down at his tea.

“An _official capacity,_ ” Pansy mocks, looking at him insolently through her lashes.

It’s feeble even when Harry tries it. He can’t bear to say that he was there as Harry Potter. “I teach Defence against the Dark Arts…”

“Oh, please, no one cares,” Pansy scoffs, tutting, seeing straight through him.

There’s not much that Harry can say to this. “It would have drawn attention to him,” he insists.

Eyes wide, Pansy is shaking her head. “ _Good_ ,” she says, and Harry rears back from her. “Attention is _good_ ,” she expands. “You capture your audience and you make them see – you say, this isn’t _Draco Malfoy_ , this is _Harry Potter’s boyfriend_ , and if you come near him Harry Potter will –”

“I couldn’t do that,” Harry interrupts, because he’s never used his name to threaten anyone. Also – “He’s not some –”

“This is more dire than Draco’s letter suggested,” Pansy interrupts. She’s sitting back into her settee, looking off towards nowhere as though Harry’s beyond hope. “Really, what are you doing?” she asks Harry directly, as though Harry could only have selfless motives. “Like I told you, he doesn’t need protection; he needs a good…”

Her eyes trail to her son, now grinning keenly as he recites an ever more complicated story about fruit, his brown hair cut neat and smart. They’re onto _persimmon_ and _papaya_ now. Mandragora’s expressions are wide and exaggerated, impressed.

“You cannot be waiting for the world to be ready… _Harry Potter_ shacking up with _Draco Malfoy?_ ” Pansy exclaims like a journalist, appalled. Her tone switches. “You have to style it out,” she instructs. “ _Oh, it was all a long time ago,_ ” she pretends to be Harry, dropping her head to her shoulder and waving her hand, implying that whomever she’s talking to is uncool and boring. “ _We’ve both grown as people; opposites attract; I couldn’t resist; look at that physique; wouldn’t you?_ ”

Needless to say, Harry can’t imagine saying this to anyone, let alone Rita Skeeter.

And yet Pansy seems to settle on her last suggestion, nodding. “Give the story a little _sex,_ ” she suggests, looking at Harry wickedly over her teacup. “It’s the only thing more interesting than your political divisions.”

“Draco’s politics aren’t –”

He was getting away with it, but this time, the moment that Harry says Draco’s name, Pansy cringes.

Harry stops talking, glaring.

Pansy smiles sweetly.

Rolling his eyes, Harry remembers himself. “It’s too late for that anyway,” he says dully. “I’ve left him.”

“What?” Pansy glances to the side, as though looking for their audience, again. “At home like an umbrella?”

She’s extremely irritating, Pansy von Herrschenberg. “You’re the one who said –”

“Draco gabbled on about a flat,” Pansy interrupts, with no apology. “I’ve since surmised – from _Loony Lovegood_ ,” she seems dismayed to have to point out, “that this is _your_ flat, in _your_ house, with _your_ resurrected family.”

Harry looks at her.

“He’s there with your parents, your godfather, your sister, your brother-in-law and your housekeeper,” Pansy repeats herself, scoffing, missing out someone who should be on the list. “You haven’t left him,” she declares, as though she’s very wise. “The only thing you’ve left is yourself.”

This hangs in the air for a moment. Pansy picks up her tea to take a sip.

“That makes no sense –” Harry tries to interrupt.

“Shut up, Potter,” he’s told, and the tone makes Harry’s heart sting. “I’ve been to therapy.”

“Really?” Harry can’t help but ask, reaching for a sandwich. It’s some sort of posh egg'n'cress.

“Once,” Pansy concedes, shrugging and giving him a look through her mascara as though he should sympathise. “It was awful. I never went back.”

It takes a lot of effort not to laugh.

“I don’t belong in Grimmo,” Harry goes on, rather tired of pretending otherwise. He bites off a mouthful of excellent sandwich. “Hogwarts is my home,” he says definitively.

“ _Hogwarts_ ,” Pansy repeats, appearing to choke on the word, leaning forward, her eyes blinking with incredulity.

“Yeah,” says Harry, swallowing. “Like every other weird wizarding kid, I turned up at the age of eleven and found my family –”

“What weird wizarding kids are you talking about?” Pansy exclaims. A shriek enters her voice, like violence. “What _school_ are you talking about? I have never –”

She looks over to the dining table, where her son and Mandragora have gone silent, again. The boy looks very young; startled.

“Don’t – worry, Alfie darling; Mummy’s only getting excited…” she says nervously, distracted, forcing a smile. She puts her cup in her saucer, kisses her fingers and reaches out her hand as though to bless his forehead through the air.

They share a smile and then Pansy shakes her head to turn back to Harry. There’s some sort of maths game being suggested as distraction.

“You realise that you have left school, Potter?” Pansy tells him forcefully, and it’s odd. “By the good grace of Merlin, that’s all done.” She puts down her tea and takes a sandwich, tearing off a corner, contemplating it before she pops it in her mouth, talking through the mouthful like Harry. “You don’t look into the eyes of those snot-nosed kiddies you teach and think, _mm, you are my children_ , do you?”

“It’s…” Well, all right, Harry thinks. It’s fair to say that he does not do that, fond though he is of quite a few of them. He likes to help them figure things out, more than dictate things. He wants them to leave after NEWTs and feel confident going off to make their own way – to forget him, if they like. That’s his job, as he sees it. So he’s not sure who he’s talking about, because he doesn’t mean McGonagall, really. He doesn’t mean Neville or Hagrid.

He likes the Highlands, he thinks. He likes the lochs and the mountains and the sky, even if he’ll always have been born to London.

Looking at him, Pansy asks a question, eating more of her sandwich, the expression on her face as though she hasn’t had lunch. “Do you know what I did when I left school?”

Harry shakes his head, not quite ready to speak.

“I thought to myself, thank _fudge_ the Dark Lord’s dead; I said, _Daddy, let’s go to America_ ; I kept my eye on the same goal I’d had since I was eleven – namely, marrying up.” She doesn’t look ashamed of it. “Focus. That’s what you need.”

Harry frowns, because he has plenty of focus. He has the new term; he has the blank correspondence, which will all be more secrets, but Harry’s working up to puzzling them out –

But then this woman says – “Did I want to be Miss Pansy Parkinson forever?” She answers herself. “Absolutely not, and now she’s gone, the bitch is dead.”

She covers her mouth with her hand on saying _bitch_ , glancing guiltily at the table as though she expects to be scolded.

“I don’t care what that therapist thinks,” she goes on, leaning forward to pick up a cake, giving Harry a view right down her cleavage, which he doesn’t need, thank you. “I’d kill her again in a heartbeat.”

“Don’t you feel bad about…?” Harry begins, looking away until Pansy’s sat back up. _Feminism,_ he wants to say vaguely, and he wishes that he’d ever got a grip on what the core points are. All of this sounds unhealthy to him; he doesn’t like the idea of even metaphorical killing. “Hermione’s getting married and she’s going to stay Madam Granger,” he comes out with, not sure what he means.

“Well, if the choice is that or _Weasley_ ,” Pansy immediately retorts, as though she can’t help herself.

Harry bites down on his teeth, before finishing his sandwich. It’s true that Ginny’s become Ginny Núñez, but Puds U have kept her as Weasley on all the new season’s material.

He glances at Alfie at the table, who is very small and must be getting tired from all of this mental activity. He reins himself in. “What are you focused on now that’s done?” he asks, instead of starting another argument.

And Pansy shrugs her shoulders at him, as though this should be obvious. “Using anything and everything money can buy to raise my children better than those pieces of work who raised me.” She flashes a smile. “Sasha’s very supportive.”

“Oh,” replies Harry, off-balance. This sounds – remarkably conscientious. He assumes that Sasha is the husband, Nebuchadnezzar von Herrschenberg the twelfth. “How d’you get to _Sasha?_ ” he asks out of curiosity.

“Alexander is a middle name,” Pansy tells him. “It’s _European_ ,” she adds as though this should mean something.

“Right.”

“You see,” Pansy goes on, as though they’re in conspiracy. She ducks forward again, reaching for one of the tiny cakes, something with posh citrus marmalade, probably not oranges. Harry keeps his eyes on it. “ _Practical solutions_ ,” she says, sitting up and popping the cake in her mouth. “It’s the Slytherin way,” she insists as she munches.

“I’m going to find Remus Lupin,” Harry says, because that’s the plan. He’s Harry’s child, by law. A dependant. A foundling from the snow. He’s very fit; he’s Harry’s uncle. He’s something or other; he’s family. “I think he’s gone to stay with a bloke called GD. Gary. If I can read the rest of his letters, I might find out where he lives.” He might find a load of pornographic fantasies. “Or at least where he was living ten years ago.”

“And what will you do then?” Pansy asks him, with irony. “Bring him back to your hotel room for cake?” She seems to have already given up on the idea of delivering Harry to Draco, as though despite her front, she has no faith in her abilities at all.

Harry’s taught teenage girls. He knows the signs. Maybe that’s why he admits it. “I do want to go back.” It’s been four long weeks, and it’s been lonely, Harry can admit, living in rooms off his office with only a purple stuffed dragon for company. “He’s…”

“Mm?” Pansy asks, as though she’s barely interested.

He was talking about Lupin, not Draco, and yet Harry finds himself telling Pansy anyway. “I’m lost without him,” he admits, and it makes him laugh, in the end. “It’s that thing people say. He’s my other half,” he comes out with.

At length, Pansy sighs, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.

Harry feels his laughter fade, the feeling turning in his chest. “I don’t… I dunno how to do it.” It would be embarrassing, he thinks, turning up sheepish at the door. The way they’d all look at him, with indifference or anger or pity… He doesn’t trust himself to pull it off. “I think – Moony’s the same.” He has to believe it. If Moony doesn’t feel _shame_ , at least, for breaking Harry’s godfather’s heart, for leaving his son –

Pansy sighs, glancing at him. “This is why Loony Lovegood was going on about breadcrumbs,” she says dully, as though she’s annoyed for having thought it was stupid.

“Everything she says makes sense in the end,” Harry points out, feeling low.

“I went to her shop on the Alley,” Pansy admits, as though this is embarrassing. “I think she volunteered her and her _ridiculously_ famous girlfriend’s flat as a halfway house.” She doesn’t sound sure of this; she sounds put out. “How did Loony Lovegood end up with _Liz Townsend?_ ” she asks as though this is a crime, going for a scone and a pot of jam.

Harry’s never been good at gossip. “I think they met at a party and fancied each other.” Snogged in the kitchen.

They must have met before, Harry thinks. But maybe not. He’s not sure he’ll ever get a grip on Luna.

“You are frightfully simple,” Pansy tells him, her eyes flashing and sharp, and Harry’s heart pangs for missing someone else.

Ten years, they’re supposed to have been apart, Harry thinks. It just goes to show how little Draco’s changed from school, at his core.

“What is it that you’re doing with me?” Harry asks Pansy now, heartsick.

Pansy glares at him, pointedly side-eyeing her son at Harry’s tone. “I can’t take you back to Draco like this,” she declares, with a definite spoonful of jam. “You’re a pitiful wreck. You’ll only cover three birthdays at most. What do you need to finish your project?” she enquires, sitting back, as though this will solve things. “Do you need money?”

“No,” Harry tells her, shaking his head and looking down. He doesn’t know what he needs. Another clue or something. He’s eavesdropped loads, and he hasn’t found anything. He’s not sure that he wants to go back in a pensieve –

“Oh no,” Pansy says then, dramatically.

Harry looks up.

She’s waving her scone aimlessly at his face and around him. “Potter, what’s wrong with you?” she asks him, as though she’s confused. “What’s missing?”

Harry frowns at her. He’s just explained –

“Your _entourage_ ,” she spells out. “How are you here – how are you walking and breathing without Granger and Weasley to prop you up? Have you even told them what you’re doing?”

Oh, Harry thinks.

* * *

“I think I’m offended,” is the first thing that Ron says, when they’re all finally gathered in Pansy’s hotel sitting room. They should have been meeting at Luna’s, but Pansy had her _babies_.

Mandragora and Alfie have gone into to Mandragora’s room, for _peace and quiet_ and for _reading_. Harry’s certain that being posh is exhausting. Whatever happened to imaginative play with a sock?

(“We have imaginative play in the morning,” Pansy pointed out when Harry asked her, cringing at the adjoining door and Mandragora’s passive aggression. “We’re winding down for bed now. He should have had something more dinner-like for dinner, but the sandwiches were remarkably expensive. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

She was looking at Harry like he was a father, again. “I’m sure it’s fine.”)

In any case, there’s loads left, sandwiches and cake and scones and tea. Harry finds a kettle and heats up some water for refills, because he doesn’t know the charm his dad uses. Luna’s sitting next to him on one of the settees, and she’s clearly fond of the little rose-and-lychee cakes too.

“You’re not offended, Ron,” says Hermione, rolling her eyes. She’s sitting with Pansy because Ron chivalrously insisted on taking one of the dining chairs – which has put Hermione’s back up as it is. She’s another month round for the end of September, recovering well from the fact that Alfie von Herrschenberg knows her name and is small enough to have made her tear up and call him _the most darling little wizard_ as he solemnly shook her hand.

Harry’s apologised for missing her birthday. He’s been rewarded and it’s awful; he’s looking down at a present he never received for his own. It’s a pair of aviator sunglasses, their lenses dark brown-green, like Harry’s glasses were on holiday. Draco dithered for a week, apparently, but in the end they’re only charmed to match Harry’s prescription, keep clean and not break.

They were made before Draco found out about Harry’s aviator jacket, but Luna’s brought this with her too. Harry hasn’t asked how she ended up with either one.

Swapping his souvenir glasses for his normal ones, Harry doesn’t even care that this is inside.

“Very sharp, Potter,” Pansy says, her eyebrows quirked as though she thinks the opposite. Her face settles into focus with the charm.

Hermione’s still talking to Ron. “We’re both tremendously _relieved_ that Harry’s found the strength to reach out…”

“You need this now,” Luna’s saying to Harry, dreamy, taking the conker-gleaming jacket from her lap and throwing it around Harry’s shoulders. It’s sweet of her, because she’s been vegetarian since childhood.

Harry came south without a hoody or a coat, and he’s been a bit cold all day. It is nothing but a pleasure to jostle his arms down the jacket’s fuzzy sleeves.

“I’m not annoyed about that,” Ron’s telling his future wife, presumably meaning Harry’s absence from Grimmo. “I’m annoyed about the fact that despite it being my _job_ …”

From the corner of his eye he catches sight of Harry in his sunglasses and his jacket, which Harry’s still adjusting on his shoulders.

“Mate –” he interrupts himself, smirking and then laughing, like Ron. “You look like a cock.”

“ _Ron,_ ” Hermione hisses.

But Harry’s laughing, because this is _exactly_ the reaction he imagined when he bought it. “It’s great, innit?” he tells Ron, pointing his elbows, grinning as he pushes the green glasses up his nose.

“Have we gone back in time?” Ron demands, laughing at him. “I think Martin Miggs had a get-up like that in one of the annuals.”

“I think that you look very nice, Harry,” says Hermione earnestly, and it’s going to make Harry cry. “Are you thinking about a change in look?”

“For Merlin’s sake, Granger,” Pansy snaps, pulling a face. Her behaviour’s slipping, with Alfie in the other room. “He’s thinking about seducing his boyfriend.” She says it scathingly, flippant, distracting. “Were you too busy being a swot to realise what it did to poor Draco, watching Harry Potty _fly?_ ”

The room goes silent. Harry looks down at himself, the fluffy shearling coloured brown-green, and he can’t believe that he forgot the reason why he packed this jacket away.

“I think it’s nice that Draco makes you cuddly, Harry,” Luna says warmly, leaning forward to pick out another cake.

And Ron bursts out laughing, his ears going pink – or darker green, from Harry’s perspective.

“I can be cuddly if I like,” Harry tells him, not able to keep a straight face. The whole world’s green, for a start, earthy like a forest.

Ron’s giving him a look. “I’m trying to imagine Malfoy submitting to a _cuddle_ ,” he says.

It’s a good joke. Harry finds himself smirking. “I don’t give him a choice.” He feels smug, thinking about it.

“That’s not funny, Harry,” Hermione says, pointing at him with a sandwich. Her eyes are wide and guileless, and she’s trying not to laugh. “ _Consent._ ”

“I’ll have you know that he’s the one who came onto _me,_ ” Harry comes out with, and he’s never revealed this before. It doesn’t sound good; he has to keep going. “Proper aggressively,” he insists. “In a tent,” he describes. “I had no idea what was happening; I thought he’d had a break.”

Pansy titters, at least.

“In a _tent_ ,” Ron repeats, looking up to the ceiling, as though this is a puzzle that he’s been working on for years and he should have known it all along.

“When were you two sharing a tent?” asks Hermione. It takes her about five seconds to work it out, looking at him. “Oh Harry,” she says, and she sounds honestly concerned. “Are you sure that you didn’t take advantage…?”

And Harry worried about this at the time, once he’d come to terms with the fact that he’d had _sex_ with _Malfoy_ and it had been _good_ – he’d had sex with Malfoy _several times_ and he wanted to see him _again_ … Which seems like an unnecessary set of worries, four years on. “Dunno,” is what he’s ended up concluding. “We are where we are,” he points out with a shrug.

“Which isn’t where we should be,” Luna points out, giving it him in the neck.

“Yes,” agrees Pansy, before looking startled – looking at Luna as though she’s betrayed her.

Luna remains oblivious, humming a little tune, long hair straggled over her shoulders as she takes in the huge, blank television.

“Please let us get on,” Pansy continues, rallying. “I’m expecting your usual tedious antics, and the longer it takes, the longer I have to wait before I’m taken to bubbly brunch.”

It’s not clear to Harry that the logic of this follows, but he lets it stand anyway.

Giving him a look, Ron sighs. “Everyone’s a mess, mate,” he tells Harry abruptly, and it makes Harry blink. “Can we really not do this at home?”

Harry looks at him, green, and he can only imagine himself shouting, if everyone gathered in the drawing room. He doesn’t know what to say.

“You don’t _have_ to be the one who finds Remus, you know, Harry,” Hermione tells him, her gaze sharp. “You’re enough for Sirius and your mum and dad on your own. You can talk to them; you can talk to Draco…”

“I’m crap at talking,” Harry reminds her.

“You are _not_ crap at talking,” Hermione insists. “You teach for a living.”

“You reckon that McGonagall gave me my job to keep me like a pet,” Harry comes back with, because he overheard this.

Sitting opposite him, Hermione narrows her eyes.

“Don’t take it out on Hermione,” Ron somehow says perfectly casually, going for a scone. He has strong feelings about scones, but he seems to decide that the rant’s not important today. “She’s fallen for Sirius,” he jokes for some reason, and it puts Harry off. “I’ve seen the way she looks at him; his pain is hers now. It’s tragic.”

“I do _not_ fancy Sirius,” Hermione complains, sounding familiar, maybe like Harry himself. “Harry’s dad would be much more fanciable,” she pushes, and this is a joke too, though it only makes Ron laugh. “If he hadn’t declared himself my surrogate father,” she says, oddly as though she doesn’t mind, “and if he didn’t look so much like _Harry._ ” And here she makes an appropriate face, which is disgusted. Ron nods as though he understands.

Harry bristles, though he’s not sure at what. “Oi!”

Luna and Pansy are sharing a look, Harry notices –

– but Hermione’s looking back at him, smug. She blithely reaches out for a sandwich.

“Right,” Ron declares, having efficiently spooned cream and jam and taken a munch, slapping his knees before Harry can work out how to defend himself. “I do this for a living; Hermione researches – and you’re you,” he tells Harry, making him uncomfortable. “If it takes us the school year, like it did at age eleven, I’ll be seriously worried. We might have day jobs to contend with, but I give us till Halloween, all right?”

“Fine,” agrees Harry, giving in. “You can come up to Hogsmeade tomorrow. I’ll show you what –”

“Ooh, Madam Puddifoot’s!” Pansy comes out with, and they all look at her. “What? I was invited,” she insists, holding a fresh cup of tea.

“You can be my date,” Luna suggests, inviting herself along too.

This doesn’t make sense, Harry thinks.

* * *

Somehow, Luna persuades Harry to spend the night in her spare room, instead of going back to Hogwarts. He eats a light evening meal with her and Liz, forgetting to take off his sunglasses until he goes to bed, when he sets them on the bedside table. He casts _Nox_ at the ceiling and lies on his side under the duvet, focused on their gleam in the dark, scattered and flaring.

They’re an excellent distraction. Then he falls asleep and has a nightmare. It’s Cedric and the cup, the feeling more than the event. It’s the feeling of completion, success and shared victory, the hook in his navel swirling him away and the cold dread of that cemetery, confusion and displacement.

 _Kill the spare,_ something says, and it’s him, and Cedric’s strangling him the way that Uncle Vernon tried to that summer, when Harry was underneath the window, listening for news.

Accidental magic bursts through Harry like fire, and then Cedric’s on fire, stumbling and falling away from him, dead, and –

Harry wakes up in darkness, his heart pounding, his skin covered in sweat.

There’s a sound somewhere off towards his sitting room – no, the bathroom – no, towards the door, because he’s at Luna’s, not Hogwarts or the flat. Harry lunges for his wand and he barely has to touch it before a bright swell of _Lumos_ bursts from the end to the fitting. He’s casting _Stupefy_ before he can think –

His eyes catch on a blur: bright hair, bright skin and bright eyes, startled and frozen.

Instinctively, heart lurching, Harry overextends and the hex hits the wall, leaving a burnt black mark as sparks meet the plaster. “The hell are you doing here?” he snaps, angry at himself, panicked.

Draco says nothing, folding to the door.

Not trusting the violence in his limbs, his hard fingers, Harry considers the slash of black on the wall. Draco’s mum used to use the horse, _eoh_ , ᛖ. But Draco always makes Harry think of the dawn, and the dawn has always calmed him – so instead he casts a few more marks to make _dæg_ , ᛞ. He makes the rune glow with all the warmth he can muster. It feels better simply to cast it.

In the rune’s light, pink and gold, Draco seems to thaw and he breathes, shutting his eyes and ducking his chin to his chest as he comes back to himself.

“I thought that I could be presumptuous enough –” Draco mocks, opening his eyes and looking at Harry with a startling depth of longing, even fuzzy. He must have apparated here, Harry thinks. It’s the middle of the night.

And Harry understands, because he’s been where Draco is. He reaches for his glasses and finds the green sunnies instead. Whatever. “You’ve got to not think about it,” he explains to Draco as the world turns sharp. “You break in and you finish it in one.”

Stood against the door by a fading rune, Draco’s looking at him, and he doesn’t seem to understand. It was five months ago that he woke up Harry in his Hogwarts bedroom; he seems to have forgotten it now. “You’re wearing the glasses I made you,” is what he says.

“Obviously.”

Draco blinks.

With a sigh, Harry pulls back the duvet. He’s only wearing his t-shirt and boxers, and can hardly be an attractive sight, all feet and toes and hairy legs, unnecessary aviators.

He says it anyway.

“Get in,” he instructs, shuffling back on the mattress, hooking his head to the side, not sure what he’ll do if Draco doesn’t.

Pulling off his robes and getting rid of the lights – every step with hesitation – Draco eventually climbs into the bed, shoving his wand under the pillow, crawling into Harry’s space, frowning and suspicious as Harry lays the duvet over both of them, up to their ribs.

Harry’s nerves tingle as his eyes adjust to the darkness. They both settle down to the mattress, hands jostling into each other. Draco pulls up the duvet on his side, his body too present next to Harry’s underneath it.

It’s always the same, Harry thinks as their eyes meet momentarily. They’ve been doing this for years.

In the end, Harry doesn’t give Draco a choice, turning over and knocking his knee into another. A cool shin. A bony foot. Draco doesn’t resist: he pulls Harry’s glasses off his face – his wand from his hand, which Harry didn’t realise was still there – setting them aside on the nightstand with what sounds like a tut.

Luna’s curtains aren't as dark as the flat’s, so Harry’s meeting Draco’s eyes again when he rolls back. The bedsheets are a softer colour than they should be – a tasteful beige rather than grey, Harry knows. He’s braced on an elbow, and now he rests his other arm on Draco’s chest, curling fingers while Draco coyly rubs their knees together, as though getting comfortable. Harry swallows.

It’s impossible to be this close to him and not want to kiss him, Harry’s learned since this started. Heart in his throat, he’s reminded of it now. Breathing heavily, his gaze rises to Draco’s mouth, which shows no expression. Again, he meets his eyes.

It’s impossible. Yet Harry’s always found ways to hold off.

“What’re you doing here?” he asks this time, lying up against him, pushing his supporting arm up towards the pillows. He sounds more accusing than he would have liked. His blood is rushing with nerves.

“I saw Pansy,” Draco tells him defiantly, curling hair behind Harry’s ear. His confidence seems to be returning, and he’s making Harry shiver. “She said that the only thing you’d left was yourself.”

Hearing the line again in Draco’s disbelieving tones, Harry feels something overwhelming, a bond between the body beneath him and his own. He glances away to the wall, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. “You bought that?” he challenges.

“She told me that you did.”

Harry swallows again, not sure what to do. He lets himself slump lower, making Draco huff and shift and accept him somehow, despite his sharp edges.

“I thought that she was going to present me like a mouse,” Harry mumbles as he gets comfortable, finding the crook of Draco’s angular shoulder, a secret he keeps.

Draco snorts, and he sounds very fond, holding Harry close in the end. Harry shuts his eyes. “As our head of house used to say,” Draco tells him, digging fingers into his hair, “she has a lot of good ideas.” The end of this sentence hangs damningly.

Harry can imagine it, and it’s a dickish thing to have said. “Are you taking her to brunch?” he asks to change the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about Snape anymore. Not Snape or Dumbledore or anyone. He wonders what else Pansy told Draco, if he knows that Harry admitted to her…

“I’m coming with you to Puddifoot’s,” Draco insists, twitching as though he’s unsure of his welcome, even now.

“As my date?” Harry asks before he can stop himself.

“As your date,” confirms Draco, scornful.

It’s impossible, Harry thinks, giving in entirely. He nudges up his head, and Draco turns to look, his body humming, or maybe that’s Harry’s. After a moment of staring into the pits of Draco’s eyes, Harry’s kissing him, hesitating for a moment before the gap’s closed and they’re shuffling onto their sides, all hips and elbows, tongues in the end, too much feeling like a chasm they’re rolling into. Harry ends up between Draco the door, which is always the way that they sleep.

It’s fresh air after a long, barren winter, feeling him breathe, hearing the noise of it, the pressure and the want of his mouth. “I missed you,” Harry promises, kissing him again. “I always miss you.” Like hope or like the spring.

“Good,” Draco tells him, dry, his voice dark like peat. He’s holding Harry’s jaw. “It’s not always easy to tell,” he keeps mocking himself.

“I promise,” Harry promises, not sure what he’s promising. They don’t usually talk about it, and they both usually work up to these things. “You’re really… I’m so sorry,” he manages. “I told Pansy –”

“I know what you told Pansy,” Draco tells him knowingly. He kisses him again, as though he’s breathing him in, and Harry’s filled with relief. “I’ll allow you to be a quarter of me, I think. Perhaps a third, if you ever stop apologising.”

Before Harry can cry, he’s laughing, and then he’s being kissed harder, and that’s better.

“I don’t know why you put up with me,” Harry insists, breathing in a shudder, wishing that he knew how to sound more like a man.

Draco sighs theatrically. Harry can make out his expression even in the darkness, without his glasses on. Directly contradicting himself, it feels like to Harry, he sounds exasperated. “One day you will understand how much I desire to be kept at your mercy.”

“But why?” Harry asks him, fiddling with the collar of his t-shirt. He doesn’t understand. He ends up saying it. “I don’t know what you expect,” he admits, meeting the dark of Draco’s eyes. “If you were at my mercy, there’d be no kinky sex.”

“Would there not?” Draco asks, fiddling with Harry’s hair and sounding disappointed. “What would there be?” he asks speculatively, his face very close.

Harry pauses for a moment, imagining it. “I dunno,” he allows in the end. “I mean, I wish you’d eat some vegetables. Cuddle your bear and go to sleep once in a blue moon…”

“Right,” agrees Draco, sounding smug, as though he’s won an argument. “And you count yourself unworthy of my affection because –?”

Lying so close to the urgent body in front of him, Harry feels his eyes sting. He doesn’t know what to say. He feels mortified, because he’s basically described Draco as a toddler he’s trying to raise.

“And I don’t know what you were talking about when you left,” Draco goes on, as though he’s spent a lot of time reflecting on it, not sounding like a toddler, thank Merlin. “You cannot believe that the wolf doesn’t prefer you – over all of us. He’s my responsibility,” he claims arrogantly, half-joking. “He took a wife from the family and now he’s fucking her cousin. He’s a Black through and through; he’s passed the test…” Draco strokes Harry’s jaw. “This doesn't mean we _like_ each other.”

It’s nothing but a load of rubbish, and Harry can’t remember what he said – but it makes him grin anyway, distracted. He doesn’t mean to let it. Tears fade as he blinks.

Draco grins at him, all pointy teeth.

“They haven’t been –” Harry corrects, ducking his head and making Draco draw him close again. He doesn’t complain, wrapping an arm around Harry’s shoulders, plunging fingers into his hair. “Not since Sirius came back.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Draco’s making this up, Harry thinks. Although… “Part of me is convinced that your godfather knows exactly where Lupin has gone. He’s simply not yet found the nerve to retrieve him.” He’s pressing his mouth to Harry’s cheek, as though he loves him. “Meanwhile, Lupin knows that he knows, and won’t come back until Sirius declares his stake.”

The idea is much too complicated for this late at night. Harry shuffles Draco onto his back again, shutting his eyes and collapsing.

Draco waits, jostling their legs and their bits around. Merlin curse him, because he knows how much Harry likes puzzles. And Harry doesn’t know how either of them can be turned on; he's a wet fish, surely, or something equally limp and cold. He’s never been good at this.

“There’s something he’s not saying,” Harry allows about Sirius, in the end, because he can’t help himself. Draco’s tight arm is making Harry’s t-shirt ride up, and he’s entirely without scruple, running fingers up Harry’s spine. “How am I supposed…?” It feels almost impossible, to Harry, getting these words out of his lungs. “I don’t know how to be this person, chasing down every second mystery and only finding something worse at the end of it. I don’t –”

There’s no interruption.

“How do I know that it’s going to be all right?”

Feeling up the small of Harry’s back, putting Harry on hooks, Draco says nothing for a long time. Then – “You told me that you wanted to be someone else,” he says, not answering the question, going somewhere different, talking about a morning they spent in the Forest of Dean.

“Yeah,” Harry tells him, because that’s the whole _point_.

Draco tuts. “But it’s not that, is it?” he insists, as though Harry’s being slow. “You want to be the person that you thought you always were,” he decides. “A boy who always did the right thing, around whom strange things happened. Of little consequence in the grand scheme of this world, but ever willing to take action and passably skilled at dismantling conspiracies – your father’s son, at the end of it, with your mother’s soul.” His fingers are more certain than gentle. “Your godfather’s son. Professor Lupin’s teacher’s pet.”

It’s embarrassing, to have it said out loud. Like everything Draco says, it sounds plausible. “When’d you come up with that?” Harry demands, pulling backwards, hot in the dark.

“I’ll have you know that it was a complex problem to solve,” Draco tells him shortly, much too romantic. “Even with my newfound insight into your interests.” He makes Harry's face burn, alluding to all of Harry's… “You have always been of tremendous consequence to me – the _biases_ …” he moves into a rant.

“Merlin’s sake, Malfoy –” Harry complains, snatching his hand, which has moved to a gesture.

“What?” Draco snaps, his hand hard bones.

 _Tremendous._ The feel of him makes Harry feverish. “You can’t _say_ things like that.”

“Yes I can,” Draco promises darkly, and at once Harry knows where this is going.

They draw together, and Harry’s every fragment is alert. He wraps an arm behind Draco’s shoulders to pull him close, opening to his mouth, squeezing his shoulders to kiss him harder, more seriously, the taste of him sharp. Weighed down, Harry’s shoved onto his back, flushing to feel his cock meet resistance, while Draco's dragging himself up and snickering as Harry grunts to feel desire spike deeper. Only ever in revenge, Harry works a hand down the back of Draco’s shorts to find where he’s soft and yielding, hidden deep under the duvet, and he just wants –

Their kisses become sloppy at this point, because Harry can’t decide between shoving his tongue in Draco’s mouth and his fingers somewhere else, and Draco’s twitching and breathing and existing is a distraction as much as it ever was.

Twitching when Harry finds the right spot, Draco’s clunking his face into Harry’s temple. “You are _absurd_ ,” he spits heavily, biting his hairline, and Harry cradles his head, willing his own hand wet. Draco licks his tongue into his ear, scraping teeth when Harry jumps, swearing, overdoing the spell. He does it again; it feels like filth and Harry can’t help his reaction. “You want no one to acknowledge that you exist,” Draco breathes, dark and quiet, goading, “but when _I_ do –”

“You’re the exception,” Harry explains, craning his neck for another sloppy kiss and groping around somewhere sloppier. He’s not certain what he’s achieving, though with a swing of his leg he’s at least able to properly…

“ _Mmph,_ ” Draco complains, losing control. “Stop talking to me,” he demands hypocritically, his voice cracking, his cock hard and rubbing, making Harry shudder. “Fucking shove something up me and get on with it, I can’t bear it, fucking – _yes_ ,” he insists, when Harry obliges. “ _Ah_ –” he keeps going.

A short while later, Harry’s blinking and and Draco’s sniggering and there is a great mess of sludgy clothing between them.

Oh, Harry thinks, catching his breath. That feels good.

He’s holding Draco’s shoulders to him in one hand and his bum in the other and he feels somehow frivolous. Light. “Why do we do this in our clothes?” Harry complains to hide his feelings, moving to pull Draco’s t-shirt over his head, already wanting him again. “There’s no need to anymore.”

Slipping from his arms, Draco’s slouchy and petulant and Harry wants him spreadeagling into the sheets, self-indulgent. For now, he’s pulling himself out of his shorts. “It is a measure of our desire,” he suggests loftily, on his back and nearly over the edge of the mattress.

“It’s a mess,” Harry tells him, rolling over so that he can take off his own t-shirt and grab his wand to clean them up. His breath is heavy and his ear feels weird, the spit drying. He likes it.

“Put that down, for fuck’s sake,” Draco tells him, plucking the stick from his hand with an indolent tweak.

It never feels like Draco’s stealing Harry's wand, when he takes it. He stretches to drop it with a clatter on the bedside table, and by the time that Harry’s out of his shorts, he’s found his own hawthorn wand and zapped at their clothes on the carpet.

“What’s the difference –?” Harry tries to ask.

“I’m taking care of you,” Draco interrupts, tucking his wand away again. Then he’s sitting up, levering heavily onto his hands with Harry over one of his knees. “Stop ruining it.”

There’s a feeling in Harry’s stomach as though he’s making a dive, Draco’s words all too sudden. “D’you know what it’s like to fall in love with you?” he demands.

In the dimness of the dark, Draco tips his head.

“ _Whoosh_ ,” explains Harry, frustrated, mocking a dive with one of his hands.

“ _Wow_ ,” Draco mocks him. Harry looks down, and their cocks are pleased to see each other, at least.

Or, well – Harry knows about his own, but he double-checks Draco’s with a graze of his hand. It is dark, after all.

“Shall we save the conversation for the morning?” Draco suggests as Harry finds what he’s looking for.

“Let’s,” agrees Harry, in his posh voice.

* * *

It doesn’t take until the morning, inevitably.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Harry comes out with when they should be going to sleep. His life falls apart, it always feels like, in the heart of the night.

He’s clinging to the back of Draco like a limpet, much too warm, but he’s too wrung out to care. He’s shivering, and he’s not sure how to conceal it. He’s squeezing his eyes shut, forehead to Draco’s fluffy hair and hard head.

“Harry –” comes a rumbling murmur, because Draco was nearly asleep.

It makes Harry feel awful. “I don’t want to lose anyone,” he can’t help but keep saying. These words have taken weeks to find voice. “Draco, I don’t want to get to the end and find out –”

His heart seizes with panic. The end of his mysteries stopped feeling fun when he was a few months off fifteen, and he’s nearly twice that age now. If things were going to go back to how they’d been before Cedric and the cup, they would have done so by this point. He can only think about taking Draco’s hand after stealing the resurrection stone from Fax Bardley, Draco's father, everything terrible, the tent insecure – until Draco decided that enough was enough, and that they should be kissing instead.

He wants that. He wants Draco instead.

With a deep sigh that Harry can feel, Draco switches their hands so that he’s holding Harry’s to his front, the line of his arm long down to Harry’s elbow. “The bastard’s fine,” he insists, his voice soft with sleep. He means Moony. The man has a lot of names. “He may have died once upon a time, but only because he decided to leap into battle two weeks after his household acquired a newborn baby. He’s not you or your father.”

Harry’s eyes are stinging. He struggles to breathe silently.

“Oh, don’t _cry_ , Harry,” Draco insists, rolling over and rubbing Harry’s arm, holding his head and kissing him between the eyes. “Something else,” he declares, as though that’ll solve it. “You’ll have heard Granger’s _horrendous_ plans for the manor?” he pulls out of nowhere. “To rid it of the Dark Lord's trace?”

Despite himself, Harry laughs. It’s the scandal in Draco’s voice, which says that part of him loves it.

“The scheme complicates itself by the minute,” he doesn’t complain, and Harry’s not sure when he learned his rebellious streak. “Your mother insists that she and your father will take out a lease – to keep the thing mine, as though I want it,” he scoffs. “Meanwhile, your Hermione’s found out from _Topsy_ that before dear Hippolytus Malfoy went on his ego trip in the 1840s, the place was called Oddlesford Court.”

Topsy’s one of the Malfoy elves, Harry knows. She comes to Grimmo sometimes to review the accounts with Draco and Kreacher and Hermione. It should be Harry, really, instead of Hermione, but Harry doesn’t trust himself with numbers.

“She wants to change back the name,” Draco says about Hermione, and Harry’s focused entirely on the sound of his voice, shivering a little even now, inside his skin. “I don’t know what to tell her… I refuse to share a name with _Oddlesford_.”

“What’s Oddlesford?” Harry asks to keep him talking.

“You know Oddlesford,” Draco chides, playing with his hair. It feels like he’s telling a bedtime story, not that Harry would know. “You’ve been there.”

“You mean…” He means the village next to his house, Harry supposes. Where the ghosts left them, screaming, and they trekked through the woods to find Draco’s mum. “You’re not having your house named after that place.”

This comment makes Draco groan indulgently, and Harry doesn’t know at all what he’s said wrong. “It wouldn’t be named _after_ – it’s the manor house of… They’re the same…” Spluttering, he seems to intuit Harry’s confusion. “Have you never considered the relationship between Hogwarts Castle and _Hogsmeade_ , at least?” He asks this as though it’s ridiculous that Harry hasn’t. “Hogwartsmeade? The village of the Hogwarts meadow?”

“You’re saying a lot of words,” Harry informs him.

“The feudal system?” Draco demands, incredulous.

“I’ll look it up at some point,” Harry promises.

This isn’t their house, Harry realises, as Draco huffs and Harry jostles himself into the pillow. The mattress is slightly less bouncy and the pillows are less soft than in the flat. He has no idea if he cast _Muffliato_ , or if Draco did. Hopefully Luna and Liz will have cast something themselves.

He feels embarrassed. Not exactly regretful.

“You won’t lose me, you know,” Draco tells him, tracing Harry’s face with his fingers. It makes Harry shiver, so he pulls up the duvet to keep them warm. “Anywhere I go, I’ll be hunted down and dragged back by the scruff of my neck.”

“What?” Harry asks, confused.

“Your _godfather_ ,” Draco complains, “has been asking after my intentions for months. I have been forced to justify every decision I’ve ever made regarding you – and do you care?” he accuses passingly.

It’s both brilliant and unreal, somehow, to imagine Sirius barking at Draco, setting him conversational traps. He can hear in Draco’s voice how much he’s enjoyed being treated like family. It makes Harry’s heart burn like an ember.

“I did not think through a single thing I’ve done,” Draco continues to complain. “It’s embarrassing; I’ve been making it up.”

“Auntie Dromeda asked me my intentions,” Harry admits.

Draco pauses. “Oh yes?”

Harry swallows. “I got annoyed with her.” It seems absurd now, to say it out loud. “It was like she was saying that I wasn’t hers and that Teddy wasn’t mine, and – then we had a row about Moony.”

There’s silence for a moment, before Draco is laughing at him, sniggering down his nose. “Darling,” he says, and Harry blinks tears from his eyes, in love with him again, “this is the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.” It’s awful, what he’s saying. It’s not funny at all. “We’re all _family_.”

It’s almost unbearable, but Harry manages not to laugh.

He’s sure that Draco can tell how much effort he’s putting in.

“Go to sleep,” Draco insists in the end, brushing fingers through Harry’s hair. “I’ll be here in the morning,” he says, as though he’s been where Harry is.


	15. An adventure, part 4

The next day, at a teashop in the village of the Hogwarts meadow, Harry gets a telling off about Moony’s briefcase.

“The thing is, mate,” Ron says, leafing through the file of bank statements. “You’ve wasted a lot of Katie’s time. There’s loads of stuff in here,” he goes on, looking at the boring muggle paper as though it’s full of important clues.

When Ron comes out with things like this, Harry can’t believe that being an auror is much fun.

“You said that Remus was living in this Gary’s boyfriend’s flat,” Ron’s now saying. “At least till 1985 or so. That’ll be the address on one of these,” he explains, reordering the papers absently, maybe by date. “It’s unlikely that he’d’ve stayed registered at his mum’s, at least from what you’re telling me. We can find out who owned the flat, which'll give us Tone’s full name, and then we can go looking for him. If these blokes were together in the eighties and nineties,” he concludes, “it’s entirely likely that they’ll be together now. They’ll know how to get in touch with each other, if not.”

Next to Harry in their booth – a great circle of tufted pink velvet surrounding a circular table, cute – Hermione breathes out something like a sigh. She’s propped an elbow on the tufted backrest, burying her fist in her hair. She’s biting her lip, looking at Ron who’s sat next to her as though she wants him to keep using logic. Probability. Occam’s razor. All her favourite things.

Sitting on her other side, Hermione’s body warm next to his from the baby, her smell a little off, Harry’s not sure he feels comfortable. He doesn’t plan on saying anything.

“Ugh,” he then finds Pansy von Herrschenberg saying for him, sliding into the booth at the other end, past Draco and Luna. “Put it away, Granger.”

She’s been setting up Alfie and baby Draco with Harry’s mum and dad at Grimmo for a couple of hours, so that Mandragora can have the full day off. It was Hermione’s idea, because Pansy doesn’t seem to trust herself with the children on her own or in public, but it doesn’t seem to have earned Hermione points.

At the dig, anyway, Hermione startles. Ron looks up from the file, blinking. His ears turn pink.

Draco snickers wickedly on Harry’s left, which makes Hermione sit up even straighter and scoff, throwing him a challenging glance before she leans into Ron and murmurs something in his ear, her hand on his leg, and –

“You don’t have to watch them, you perv,” Draco mutters in _Harry’s_ ear, curving a hand just above Harry’s knee to make Harry look at him.

Beyond Draco, Harry can see Pansy scoffing, rolling her eyes and pointedly engaging Luna, who’s drinking milkshake from her glass through a straw.

Much closer, however, Draco’s eyes gleam with wickedness, and he and Harry had sex before breakfast, because Draco was sitting in bed all elbows and knees and his eyes were the same colour as the sky when Harry opened the curtains (“You’ve just come back from the shower,” Draco didn’t complain at the time.).

There’s a silky sort of ease to Draco’s demeanour, here in Hogsmeade, to his expression, and Harry finds himself looking at his mouth, which is almost moving to a smirk. He smells lovely, like coffee without bitterness, the way he does in the mornings. Spicy.

“You’re worse than the bear,” accuses Draco softly, leaning an inch closer, meaning Humphrey in the flat. He’s still holding Harry’s knee.

“You love the bear,” Harry accuses back, looking up to meet his cloud-coloured eyes.

“Do I?” And –

There’s a shriek as Pansy laughs at something Luna’s saying and Hermione’s jostling against Harry’s side and Harry comes back to himself. Draco’s hand leaves his knee, but there’s a window of opportunity in all the movement, so Harry takes it to squeeze Draco’s leg much higher up.

It makes him jump wildly, and Harry steals a piece of fudge from the top of his cupcake as an excuse to hide his grin.

“I’ll apologise to Katie,” Harry promises Ron, sitting back, smirking but not looking as Draco twitches in outrage under his hand.

Ron nods, looking down at the paper, ears fading pink, and he’s only being fair. “Yeah, you do that,” he says, making Hermione laugh for some reason.

Outside of Hogsmeade weekends, free of the fug of teenage hormones, Madam Puddifoot’s is a slightly less awful establishment than its reputation continues to be. Harry’s not certain that there isn’t some sort of potion diffused by the fire, but the place is unthreatening as a cutesy teashop full of tourists and shrieky young women who appear from the floo.

It may only feel unthreatening because Harry’s happy to be here with who he’s with. But it’s been a nice morning, so far. The quidditch season’s started up, so Liz has gone to commentate for the WWN, but there was no rush as they had breakfast – cereal, which Draco was sceptical about, though he made it through a bowl of cornflakes in the end (“Hello Draco,” was all that Luna said when they appeared at the table. “Did you come through the floo?”).

Luna’s intervention made Liz snort pumpkin juice down her nose, but it turns out that she’s been listening to what Harry’s dad’s been saying on Lee Jordan’s show, about equal rights and the European Gobstones Championship. From what she’s heard, her WWN bosses are thinking about asking him to apply for a job (“He’s not the first person to say any of it – you know that and I know that – but the punters like listening to him, you can’t deny it. He can say the same thing ten times and make it sound fresh. He’s a natural broadcaster.”

“He’s a natural something, all right,” Harry allowed, marvelling at his dad’s jamminess. How did he get away with it?

Liz seemed to understand him perfectly, glancing at Luna and Draco, who were talking about something else, at the time. “I’d rather your dad than the other wankers they’re planning to put on the shortlist.” She said it dryly, as though Harry could understand her point just as well.).

The current Puddifoot’s menu boasts every kind of coffee-shop coffee, with a long list of options for syrups and toppings. Then there are the ridiculous cupcakes, more icing than cake by proportion, approximately half of Honeydukes littered on top of each one.

Harry ordered a pot of tea, which he was working through with Draco and Luna before Ron and Hermione arrived. Luna ordered her milkshake and Draco ordered a coffee and a chocolate fudge cupcake after quite a lot of dithering. He’s insisting on eating it with a fork, and he hasn’t got very far, but Harry takes all credit for working up his appetite.

Returning to what they’re supposed to be discussing, Harry leaves his hand on Draco’s leg. “I’m certain that Moony’s with Gary and Tone,” Harry tells Ron. “And if you say that we can find him with what we’ve got, then let’s find him, that’s great. What’re we going to do when we get there?”

“We’re going to tell him that we miss him, and that we want him to come home,” Hermione says, and Harry’s chest tightens.

“I’m not sure that’ll work,” Ron remarks, leafing through papers.

“But it’s _true_ ,” says Hermione.

Draco sounds bored, which is a lie. “Truth is a matter of perspective,” he states, and he could talk about this for hours, Harry’s sure.

“Mm,” grumps Luna, as though she disapproves. It makes Draco react as though she’s sworn.

“We lay out a trail of breadcrumbs,” Pansy suggests, as though if she repeats this enough it will become her own idea. She catches a waiter and seems to be ordering the same thing as Draco, only her latte’s going to be sweet and vanilla. It sounds horrible, to Harry. “It worked for Potter.” Pansy gestures with a hand, giving him a smirk before she looks to Harry’s left.

There’s a titter from Draco, very quietly, and Harry imagines that his secrets are doomed. How much he likes to leave the light on; the time when he –

“Reel him in with a treat,” Pansy continues, “a few presents, dangle his friends in front of his eyes and then _pah_.” She makes a flashing gesture with her hand, which seems to imply putting Draco in his bed.

Harry tries not to flush.

And then – “Harry’s not come home yet,” Ron reminds Pansy dryly, not looking up from the file.

It causes Harry a deep pang of shame. “Uncle Moony’s more stubborn than I am,” he says to keep the conversation moving.

“He’s had decades more practice,” Draco qualifies, sounding knowledgeable, his tone warning.

“We need to give him honesty,” Hermione insists, patting Harry roughly on the arm.

At this point, Harry looks at Luna. It seems obvious that she has an opinion. Her eyes are wide and blue, looking back at him.

“What kind of wand does Professor Lupin use?” she asks simply, pulling her mouth from her straw and setting her glass on the table. She’s wearing pink and red robes, clashing – the inner robe pale pink with dozens of sketched faces embroidered in deep red; her outer robe is the opposite, deep red embroidered with pale pink. Every face seems to bear a different expression.

Harry answers her question. “ _Cupressus sempervirens_.” The words make Draco shift under Harry’s hand, because he likes it when Harry knows things. Harry squeezes, promising to talk about trees with him later. “Heartstring core from a Romanian Longhorn.”

“How depressing,” Luna responds harshly, her eyes serene.

And Luna’s had three wands in her life, Harry knows. Her first wand, of ebony, was taken from her and snapped. Her second, Ollivander made with the best wood he could find near Shell Cottage, which ended up coming from one of Fleur’s rose trees. The core came from one of the Prewett twins’ wands, which Bill had used at Hogwarts.

It’s not clear who’s going to end up with this second wand, in the future, but it was never the right fit for Luna. Too prickly. It’s a swashbuckler’s wand, Harry thought when he held it. It must have been Fabian’s heartstring core, he thinks now. It won’t suit Victoire.

As for Luna’s third wand, cherry wood and phoenix feather, Harry was with her when she first took it up. An owl was sent him, asking if he would like to attend the coring. He looked in on all the stages, in the end.

Harry’s never wanted another wand, and his wand’s never wanted another wizard – but he can’t imagine Luna with anything else now than his holly wand’s cherry twin, and she’s only had that for four years.

“I notice that no one’s suggesting we find him and talk to him without expectations,” Luna says in Madam Puddifoot’s, her tone clear as a bell. “There’s no need for him to come back, if he wants to be gone. Things stay in this world and things leave.”

For a few short moments, no one says anything.

“Draco, I’m taking her home in my suitcase,” Pansy then interrupts, talking over the top of Luna’s head. “My friends will love her.”

“Like fuck you are,” Draco informs Pansy archly, making her cackle, pulling loose of Harry to wrap an arm around Luna’s shoulders. He kisses her on the hair as she grins a mischievous grin. “I found her; Loo’s mine.”

Harry feels jealousy, burning. He also thinks that they’re forgetting something. He thinks that he disagrees with Luna’s point, and his mum said that it was all right to disagree sometimes.

Luna looks at him. As punishment for everything Harry’s ever done, it feels like, she winks.

* * *

The six of them go for a walk after Puddifoot’s, because everyone’s slightly too hot and too caffeinated and dried out from sugar. They should have asked for a jug of water, Harry thinks, but he kept waiting for someone else to make the suggestion.

Pansy leaves first and the others drift away, until Harry’s weekend adventure feels like it’s coming to a close outside the gates of Hogwarts. He’s turning on the cobbles in a shearling aviator jacket, taking hold of Draco Malfoy’s hand, because it’s there.

He’s not wearing his sunglasses. It’s not that sunny, and he’s not that much of a cock, he likes to think. The combination will only ever be for the snow or particularly bright winter days. Or the air, where he doesn’t fly.

“You should see what I’ve done to the flat,” Draco tells him abruptly, just as Harry’s thinking that he’ll have to say goodbye.

Instead, he he finds himself frowning, confused, most of all when Draco interweaves their fingers, as though he doesn’t want to let go. “What have you done to the flat?”

“I’ve redecorated,” Draco declares, his expression mostly blank, though Harry thinks that he can read it as wary. “Or –” he concedes, “I’ve stuck a few things up.” He’s being defensive. “It was necessary,” he insists. “After you _finally_ unpacked…” he reaches his point, no irony at all. “You took over the bed; I had to sort it out before I could sleep.”

“Draco…” Harry finds himself saying, as the facts of this sink in. Draco doesn’t drop his gaze, and Harry brushes his spare hand through blond hair. “You –”

They’re interrupted, then, by a great _crack_ of apparition. Their reaction pulls them apart, and Harry’s wand is in his fingers.

It’s Sirius, out of breath and swallowing, looking around and then at Harry with hard and solid fear in his eyes. “That was easy,” he comes out with, surprised, laughing inappropriately.

“What is it?” Harry asks, his wand never falling.

Raking his hand through his hair, Sirius sucks in breath, and Harry knows how he feels, because he’s done the trip from Grimmauld Place to Hogwarts. He’s never splinched off half his leg, though, so he can’t help but think that something drastic must have happened, to make Sirius take the risk.

“You had to solve it, didn’t you?” is what he says, nonetheless, sounding desperate and distracted, but otherwise fond and wry.

“Solve what?” Harry asks him again, because he hasn’t solved anything.

Sirius glances at Draco, glances around them, but Harry can’t believe that he takes much in. “You can’t go and find Remus, Harry,” he says. “It’s a can of pixies; he won’t thank you for it.”

Relief rushes into Harry’s lungs, because he thought –

He doesn’t know what he thought.

He meets Sirius’s eyes again. “What are you talking about?”

Clenching his jaw, Sirius looks over Harry’s shoulder, through the gates. “He owes Gary and Tone everything,” he says, talking about something that Harry doesn’t understand. “He made them one promise,” he insists with a finger. “And he is so _fucking_ clever,” he spits, unexpectedly candid, the words a deep burn of affection. “He knew that I’d always try to let him keep it, if I ever fucking –”

“Sirius, I have no idea what you’re saying,” Harry tells him.

Draco is watching them, silent, and Harry’s not sure that Sirius has registered that he’s here.

“It’s been tearing me up,” Sirius goes on, looking down at the cobbles, at their feet. “He’s always done this to me –”

Harry thinks of Sirius’s late nights out on his motorbike; his expression. “I don’t –”

“Harry,” Sirius confesses, swallowing, meeting his eyes as though this is something terribly, terribly important. He sounds spiteful, betraying a trust, making a choice and loathing himself for it. “Gary is Caradoc Dearborn. He’s supposed to be dead.”

No one says anything for a moment. It’s early afternoon, the sun high behind clouds.

“So?” Harry asks at length, not sure what he’s feeling in his chest. It doesn’t match the expression on Sirius’s face. Part of him thinks that if Moony didn’t want this to come out, he’d never have told Sirius, all those years ago.

Part of him thinks that this is _just_ the sort of thing that used to come out in school, and the Ministry needs to keep better track of who’s alive and who’s dead among its citizens.

“ _So_ ,” explains Sirius, the words tumbling out of him with honesty. When he says them, he’s not looking at Harry like a child, but still as though they’re close, as though Harry’s his godson. “He deserted. He left behind his sister and her husband – his best friend from school. All his other mates and his nephew…”

He laughs, Sirius, stressed, and he’s talking about Neville, for whom Harry feels a stab of anguish. At the same time, though, this is _Neville_ , Harry thinks, so he’s only about to take it in his stride.

“Moony knows, because he used to think about…” A swallow. “The shame of it, Harry,” Sirius says, looking at him dead on and gesturing with his hands, as though he’s asking Harry to be his godfather and make sense of this, please, just this once. “It was always Dockers’ greatest shame, and he had a few, and he risked it all for this stray that his lover found strung out, half-starving and shouting at nothing in an alleyway – off his face, I don’t know…”

Harry feels it as Draco steps closer, urgent and certain, reassuring.

“I did that to him,” Sirius is insisting, meaning Moony now, slamming his fist with his wand right into his chest. It hurts Harry a lot more. “I fucked him in the head, and who knows what would have happened if he hadn’t found help, but this bloke Tone found him, and Dockers knew him, so they kept him, and he _promised_ …”

In the end, Harry has no idea what to say. “You’ve known where he is all this time?” he comes out with shortly, thinking of them shouting at each other, all that ill feeling.

“I had no _idea_ that they were still in contact,” Sirius defends himself, distracted. “Not until your dad said that you’d found a letter.” A month or less, then, Harry concludes. “He didn’t say that you’d found a bloody trove of them,” he adds, and Harry’s not in the right frame of mind to find it funny. He must have heard this from Ron. “Those blank ones are not for other people’s eyes,” he says without shame, and Harry _knew_ that there was a reason he’d been holding off.

It’s Draco who snorts, very darkly.

“If you want to know why he never fought for you more than… Why he never got to keep you,” Sirius goes on, looking torn by it. “ _That’s_ why,” he says. “ _I’m_ the reason why,” he confesses, as though Harry will hate him for it. “He went into complete meltdown after the war and he never trusted himself again, because of what I did to him, when I should have looked after you, instead of… It’s too much, all of this.” He gestures around them, at nothing, at Hogwarts, at magic, at this unplottable place – and at Harry most of all. “We’re all too much.”

“This was in the eighties?” Harry checks.

“ _Yes_ ,” hisses Sirius, impatient.

And for once, Harry thinks, it feels like the eighties were a long time ago. Another time; another country. Moony was never his dad, but they became each other’s family anyway, didn’t they?

“Sirius,” Harry decides, looking down at old scars on his hand, around at the here and now, at his godfather’s smoke-grey eyes. “We have no idea if Moony’s safe from one moon to the next.” This is the sort of thing his dad would say, Harry thinks. He doesn’t mind it. “That’s more important than a promise he made decades ago about something that no one I know or you know is going to be unreasonable about.”

“Is it?” Sirius demands, looking lost, as though he’s not sure that he trusts himself to decide.

“ _Yes_ ,” insists Harry, sure in his convictions for the first time, it feels like, in years.

And the thing is, standing at the gates of Hogwarts, with Draco by his side and Sirius in front of him, Harry feels like he knows how to be someone worth being. It’s one thing to hide away when there’s nothing that he can do to help, but Sirius is looking at him like he needs someone, and Harry can’t walk away from that. And when are they going to live in a world where no one needs help?

At the end of the day, Harry thinks, it’s exhausting, being afraid. It’s exhausting, because he knows what his fifteen- or fourteen- or thirteen-year-old self would think of him, if he saw what his life had become. He wouldn’t be persuaded by any of Harry’s arguments, and he wouldn’t let himself be dismissed, because he’d faced down a lot of things already in his life and survived.

There’s not much that Harry thinks he could pass on as advice to his young teenage self. There’s not much that he could tell himself to do differently, in good conscience, in the end. Mostly it’s advice about snogging Malfoy, and Harry wasn’t ready to snog anyone before the age of seventeen, maybe not even then.

Outside the gates of Hogwarts, as September ends in 2008, Harry looks at Sirius, disturbed and secretive and so much like him, and he thinks that he would do it all exactly the same, if he had to, so what’s that? If he had a vision that Sirius was in danger, he would move hell and high water to find him. He wouldn’t take the risk of leaving him, even if he should have remembered the mirror. He doesn’t want Sirius to ever stop running after him like a dog with a lost sheep, and he’ll always belong to the house of Godric Gryffindor.

He’d let Wormtail live a hundred times, because, well, _what if?_

“Where’s Moony now?” Harry demands, outside the gates of Hogwarts.

Sirius rolls his eyes, breathing out, as though he too is feeling something like relief, to have this secret revealed. “Ibiza, most likely,” he says wryly, and it’s almost funny, this revelation. He smirks and Harry’s smirking back, because they’ve always understood each other. Draco sniggers and pretends it’s a cough. “They wanted Tone for a residency and Gary – Dockers… He was more than happy to leave the country. He does a good Donna Summer, I’m told. A bit white for it,” he concedes.

“How are we going to find him in Ibiza?” Harry asks, thinking about Ron and his bank statements. Not about the drag act, though he supposes that it could be fun to see.

Dismissively, Sirius waves a hand, and that’s much more familiar. He’s adapting to the idea even as they talk. He and Harry’s dad are both like that. “Let me worry about what we do when we get there. I’m not entirely useless,” he mocks his earlier panic.

Certain that they’ll come up with something, Harry thinks about the rest of the plan for all of three seconds. “McGonagall’s going to kill me,” he says, because there’s a full week of teaching ahead.

There’s the lightest touch to his elbow, making Harry jump and turn. Draco’s face is expressionless, insolent, and it makes Harry grin as his heart flips, because it means that he’s about to do something out of character. “This intervention sounds awfully Gryffindor,” he says in a tone of voice as though he finds it distasteful – meaning that he doesn’t mind staying behind, that he doesn’t mind…

Now, Harry thinks. He has the Ravenclaw fifth years on Monday, and they can be pedantic at the best of times. The Killing Curse was the subject of Draco’s Mysteries thesis. “You can explain the Unforgivables, right?” Harry asks as insolently as he can, to match him. “All the laws and stuff,” he suggests, as though Draco might need to look them up.

Tipping his chin, Draco looks at him balefully, and it makes Harry laugh.

Without another word, without thinking, Harry pulls his wand and casts his patronus. Hooves hit the ground like lightning without thunder, and Harry blinks at the blinding white form, but it isn’t a stag.

It’s… Of all things, it’s a unicorn. A lot like a stag, but more concentrated. Pure. It slows from a canter in a circle, easy and assured, promising to be quicker than a charging horse and ducking its head as though it could be brutal like a wolf.

“Fuck,” Draco says as though he wasn’t ready, and Sirius is laughing, surprised.

The sight of the unicorn makes Harry step back. That’s instinct, because unicorns in the forest only like Harry when he visits with Teddy.

This one, however, raises its head and looks at Harry straight through to the heart. It doesn’t mind what it sees, and Harry returns close to it, curving a hand around its warm light-made muzzle. The unicorn’s nostrils flare, and it ducks its head as though it would quite like to bray. Its long, twisting horn is silver and sharp.

Taking in the tall height and strength of the unicorn, which is nonetheless clearly not here to fight, Harry supposes that he hasn’t needed protection in a long time. But he’s always needed something to believe in, for when the battles came anyway. Once upon a time he believed in his dad. Then he believed that he could live with doing whatever he had to. Now he believes in something beautiful, and he thinks that it might be magic itself, maybe life, maybe virtue, maybe innocence.

The unicorn could be anyone, Harry thinks. He’s sure that it could be anyone, everyone.

“ _Dad,_ ” Harry calls it for now, an ache in his chest. The unicorn meets his gaze again, and its eyes are kind, its mane an artful mess that it tosses. “ _Dad, I’m sorry,_ ” Harry says, and he means it. “ _But I’m fine; you don’t need to keep following me._ ” He knows he will anyway; he’ll always have a stag to protect him. “ _I’m coming back to Grimmo in an hour or two…_ ” Harry explains, and it comes out with something like a laugh. “ _Sirius and I are going to Ibiza._ ” A thought occurs to him. “ _Wanna come?_ ”

And the thing is, arranging a portkey will take far too long. Harry’s never been to Ibiza, so he couldn’t cast the charm himself. It’s too dangerous even for Harry’s blood to apparate across saltwater. He has maps of Britain, France and Spain, and Sirius’s motorbike almost certainly can fly.

If not, Harry supposes, they can get Buckbeak out of retirement.

“ _Ask Mum too,_ ” Harry suggests to the unicorn; its tail flashes. He has a feeling that Ron and Hermione won’t be able to get out of work. “ _We’ll be taking our brooms._ ”

* * *

It takes less time to convince McGonagall than Harry would have thought.

She’s sitting behind the desk in her office, the old portraits on the wall lending her authority with condescension in their eyes. Harry’s ignoring Phineas Nigellus, the way he always does, but that’s mostly to wind him up.

Dumbledore is watching over them, his eyes twinkling, and it’s not the painting’s fault, Harry supposes, that it only has so much to say for its subject’s actions in life.

“So, what I’m saying is,” Harry concludes, trying to be responsible, sitting forward in the chair opposite McGonagall and meeting her eyes, even as he finds himself fidgeting, “I should be back by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest – and I know it’s a lot, but my, er, partner is happy to cover, and, um, he’ll be good, I’m sure.”

There are a few of Dumbledore’s old whirring instruments in McGonagall’s office, but the room feels more like the floor of a formal teashop these days than a market stall where they sell incense. Not like Madam Puddifoot’s or every other muggle coffee shop, Harry specifies to himself. There’d only be tea and traditional cake in slices at McGonagall’s, maybe pumpkin bread.

Honestly, Harry wishes that he could go to this teashop. It would be nice there, like here, where McGonagall offers him a biscuit, her fingers nudging the plate towards him over the desk.

“Is he qualified?” McGonagall asks, her expression tolerant.

Harry nods, munching on a chocolate digestive. He swallows, and the sugar shores him up. “More qualified than me.”

“Does he have experience in the field?” McGonagall maybe rephrases the question, giving Harry a look for being self-deprecating.

Harry’s not sure what she’s getting at. “Loads.”

Dumbledore’s instruments whir and Harry finishes his biscuit. Finally, McGonagall’s expression quirks to a wry grin and she sighs. “Harry,” she informs him, “you have to tell me his name.”

“Oh,” Harry says, feeling himself flush. He hopes it doesn’t show. He cringes. “It’s, er, Draco Malfoy?” he suggests, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“Tch,” tuts Phineas Nigellus. “I should have known…”

“In my day we kept these things hush-hush,” one of the others points out.

“ _Harry_ ,” says Dumbledore, as though he knew it all along. Harry gives the thing a look.

Making a sound that isn’t quite a snort, McGonagall otherwise doesn’t react. “Excellent,” she says, in a way that suggests she saw it on Harry’s face in 2004. Oh well. “That sounds fine. Perhaps we can arrange something for NEWT students interested in academia.”

“Hermione made friends with him first,” Harry finds himself saying, before he can stop it. “Luna’s been matey with him since the war. You can tell anyone you like; it’s not a secret…”

They should tell Rita Skeeter, Harry thinks. Do an interview. He can’t imagine anything worse.

“Harry,” says McGonagall again, dismissing him from the meeting, because she always has a lot to do. “I don’t need a full set of references for two days’ supply work. I trust your opinion, and checking the registers will take me less than five minutes. Besides,” she adds, and it’s bizarre. “There are a few things on which I’d like to hear his thoughts. He’s quite the authority these days, to those of us in Transfiguration.”

Harry can’t help the warm feeling that fills up his chest. He knows that Flitwick daydreams about Hermione taking over Charms, but – “I’ve been telling everyone that he should be famous,” Harry says.

“And he’s managed it all on his own,” McGonagall humours him, before waving him out of her office. “At least among those who matter,” she adds like a snob, and Harry assumes that this is a joke, or else that he must have misheard.

* * *

Packing for the journey is easy. Kreacher’s on hand with a flask for tea and a lunchbox that he can refill remotely, no matter that there’ll be food where they’re going.

“Thanks, Kreacher,” Harry tells him, earning a nod.

Harry has every map he needs, an excellent compass and speedometer. He has a pair of fingerless gloves, which his mum charms so they’re warm to his fingertips and will cut out the wind.

“Thanks, Mum,” he tells her, and she winks at him, green eyes on his. “D’you really not want to come?”

“Oh, you boys have fun,” his mum waves him off, because Harry’s dad is packing elsewhere. They’re in the empty archway to the flat. “I’ve got an appointment in the morning that I’m not allowed to skip,” she goes on, and Harry pauses, thinking of his dad talking to George about muggle medical procedures. “I don’t want you getting your hopes up, but it’ll be big news if it all goes well.” Her eyes are wide and excited, and she’s giving Harry a look as if she knows that he knows exactly what she’s talking about.

“It’s safe and stuff, yeah?” Harry asks her, because he didn’t get the chance to look up anything before the start of September.

Instead of replying, his mum tuts, pulling him into a hug and Harry squeezes her close. “You don’t worry about me,” she insists before pulling back, tucking long blood-red hair behind her ears.

“You can’t stop me, though, can you?” Harry tells her to be difficult, and they share a grin as she ruffles his hair like his dad.

Autumn in Ibiza will feel like a warm British summer, but it will be cool in the air. The sun will be high, and Harry’s prepared for both of these things.

He even has a broomstick to fly on. Sirius has been keeping it safe, out of Harry’s sight but never quite out of mind. Harry thinks of it now, as he slips back into his and Draco’s bedroom to take off his gloves and pack them for later, his fingers fumbling with the leather strap as he slips it through the brass buckle of his backpack, there on his bed.

“Ready for the test flight?” Draco asks him, slouched on his side of Harry’s bed with one knee cocked, not yet lit in green because Harry’s sunglasses are still in his jacket pocket.

Draco was telling the truth up in Hogsmeade – the flat’s walls are full of Harry’s pictures now, and it’s uncanny to see them all out, as though he’s home. There’s one to the side of Draco’s head, square above his nightstand. It’s the illustration of a spider, in pen, poised and spindling and black, sketched and abstract on thick, heavy paper, a box frame to protect it made out of dark wood. Harry bought it in maybe 2005.

Swallowing his nerves, Harry moves to distraction. “Why’d you put that one there?” he allows himself to ask.

Draco glances at it cockily, seeing straight through Harry’s motives. “It couldn’t go in the other room or downstairs because of Ron,” he says easily. His expression is mocking, beneath a mask of sincerity. “You’ve apparently told Granger several times that I remind you of a spider – she thought because of my venomous wit and tendency to appear out of nowhere.”

“And the way you cling to walls,” Harry says, looking at the drawing again. He doesn’t remember saying this. Neither he nor Hermione has ever used the phrase _venomous wit_ , he’s certain. “Your love of old buildings,” he can’t help but add anyway, when he thinks of it.

“I do like old buildings,” Draco accepts, very mockingly. And that’s one thing he likes, Harry supposes, rather surprised. It’s good, because Grimmo’s old.

Harry looks at him. He’s biting his lip, the spindly arse. “It’s your skinny legs,” Harry defends himself.

It doesn’t work. “Ron pointed out that you’ve always liked to watch them,” Draco relates, his voice low, and his gaze is impossible to look away from.

“That was a secret,” Harry finds himself saying stupidly.

Sitting up, Draco reaches towards Harry, crawling his fingers over the duvet in a way that makes Harry laugh and would make Ron shudder like anything. “Have you never been frightened of spiders?” he invites Harry to confess.

Harry ducks his eyes to his bag, frowning. “They’ve always kept me company,” is all that he’s willing to say.

He doesn’t always think of Draco as a spider. Often, Draco’s something cuddlier and twitchier, for Harry to hold and keep safe. Most of all, though, when Harry fancies him, he’s something bigger, proud and prowling and surrounded by attendants – but Harry knows he’ll never say, because he knows that Draco won’t like it.

The colour of the walls is a little drab, Harry thinks for the first time, looking around them. The paint is seven years old and could do with being refreshed. They could go for something other than white, maybe a beigey pale green.

Draco has plans for colour, Harry’s been told. As a trial, the hallway has been painted a soft heavy neutral which Harry wants to call fawn, a little darker and greyer than the colour of old parchment, the colour of the old maps now framed in the living room, serpents writhing at the edges of their oceans. It’s a colour that Harry knows he shouldn’t like, because no one’s supposed to like brown or beige. But he does, and Draco likes him, and this is their flat. It looks sharp, the new paint.

Along with the maps in the living room, Harry’s painting from the Summer Exhibition has been stuck up proudly, square and simple, its right-hand edge in line with the right arm of the sofa (“It’s pleasant enough,” Draco’s said. “I’m not sure I’d call it high art.”).

As for in here, there’s the spider on Draco’s side of the bed. On the wall near the door, he’s framed and stuck up Harry’s two David Hockney posters, of a path through a forest and a road, which Harry feels embarrassed to look at, it’s so easy to imagine why he bought them.

On the same wall, nearer to Humphrey the bear, there’s one of Harry’s charmed mirrors, reflecting for now. It’s the gilt one, instead of the ash, all pinecones and needles in its filigree.

“It makes me think of you in your castle,” Draco says, because Harry’s looking. “I didn’t want it to match the furniture.”

Harry finds himself smiling, blinking away the feeling of tears, seeing them gleam in his vivid green eyes, fierce even surrounded by the frames of his glasses. His scar’s visible under his hair, which is going grey at his temples. “I think I’ll always be holly,” he says, his voice that of a man approaching thirty.

“You’ll always be Christmas,” Draco corrects. He’s then for some reason needlessly crude, because he’ll always be full of contradictions. “It’s why your cock comes off in one pull like a cracker.”

It’s surreal to hear this said when he’s only packing a bag. It makes Harry laugh. Draco grins at him, showing his teeth.

“Do I get to see it now?” he asks – and _that’s_ the mood that he’s in, Harry realises as he props his chin on his knee. Flirtatious. He doesn’t mean Harry’s cock, but he knows that Harry will catch the suggestion. “Do I get to see Harry Potter riding a broomstick?” He says it filthily, and somehow it’s all about cock too.

Sucking in a shuddering breath, Harry looks down at the done-up buckle of his bag, sitting on grey, and he thinks of Uncle Moony, gone missing. There’s nothing else he can live with, is there, than being Harry Potter? That’s him, and this is what he knows how to do, before anything else.

In a single prowling movement, Draco climbs out of bed, rounds the long end of it and catches up Harry by the back of the head for what must be a goodbye or good-luck snog. It’s like many they’ve shared before, and surely like many they’ll come to share again.

“Think of me watching you,” he suggests, and he’s in a very strange mood. Like most of his others, it’s turning Harry on. His eyes are clean like polished limestone and his hair is the colour of sunlight. “Think of how you’ll come home and we’ll lock ourselves in here for hours.”

“All right,” Harry says. And then he goes for the hug, because he can, smelling ginger and coffee and fudge. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck,” Draco says, his face finding shearling, which makes him say, “Mm.” After Ron finding him ridiculous, this is the other reaction that Harry always wanted, and it fills him with warmth in his jitters. “This jacket is intolerable,” comes the most petulant murmur in the world, and Harry grins.

* * *

The whole house – even Kreacher – comes out to watch Harry testing the broom. Hermione’s insisted on the test before such a long journey, no matter that it’s little more than a straight line south. She and Ron are staying behind with Harry’s mum, and she’s been briefing Harry’s dad and Sirius, apparently (“I told them to watch out for you getting separated. That’s usually when it goes wrong. And I’ve told them that it’s best to trust you in a crisis, rather than waste time –”

“Nothing like that is going to happen,” Harry’s promised her, and Ron’s given him a look as though it better hadn’t.).

It’s not been weird between Harry and his dad, in the end. There’s no doubt that he’s been coming up to Scotland, catching Harry’s runs on the Map –

– but Harry was surprised to not mind being grabbed and held tight and forgiven when he came out of the floo. He hugged his dad back and said hello, like a grown-up. They shook hands and slapped shoulders (“I can give you a ten for innovation,” his dad said, once the earnest part was over. “I’ve never had a wand ignite on me before. But I’m afraid that it’s only a generous two for the period of incapacitation – your Uncle Padfoot’s average is the schoolweek. That gives you a paltry six out of ten, my son, for the total. No Dark Lord Yet.”).

“You’re going to start coming on Saturdays, aren’t you?” says Ron, putting everything else to one side to talk about quidditch. He plays for a team in one of the amateur divisions. “Steal my record as player of the match.”

There’s no risk of this. Harry’s Saturdays are Teddy’s until Hogwarts makes them obsolete. Besides, “I’m proper rusty,” Harry admits.

“Oh, shut up,” Ron tells him with a hard clap to the back.

Sirius hands Harry the broom now they’re all outside, dressed in his motorcycle leathers with a thick roll-neck jumper. He gives him a challenging quirk of his eyebrows and Harry gives him a look, to tell him to sod off.

“Are we sure that the neighbours won’t see anything?” Hermione asks for what must be the fifth time.

It’s Draco who replies, sounding impatient. “You’ve charmed this garden to the hilt. They wouldn’t notice if we hosted a circus.”

“Yes, but I don’t know how high up the charms go…”

“Mistress Hermione’s charms rise for five-thousand feet,” Kreacher says, as though he knows.

“Well – all right.”

They might well be going higher than that. Hermione’s made them practise the Bubble Head Charm, in case they feel short of breath. Sirius cast his on Hermione. He got all her hair on the first try, not even squashing it, which was impressive (“Show off,” she grumbled afterwards, and Harry could see Ron’s point from yesterday.).

Not planning to think about anything happening until it does, Harry takes the rosewood broom the way that he couldn’t on his birthday. It hums in his hand, as though it’s been patiently waiting. The bristles remain a mixture of sticks and feathers and holly leaves, licking like flames, the eyes of the peacock feathers warding off evil by watching. The golden band binding everything tight is marked with the sun’s protection and this broomstick was made for him, Harry realises. There are two tiny sigils etched in the brass that aren’t runes, two corners of squares, or maybe _LL_.

Harry supposes that he knows where he’d go, if he wanted something magic made out of wood.

 _Up,_ Harry barely has to ask the broomstick, in his head.

He kicks off before the branch is even horizontal, letting it take him into the air and pushing down with his hands to make the leap. The broomhandle pushes back, secure. It offers a warm and growing murmur, approving – not like Luna, its creator, but like something more familiar. Harry’s weight is distributed differently from when he was a teenager, but he’s not calling on muscle memory, he doesn’t think. It’s something else.

He moves into a barrel roll as the broom takes him skywards, an exhilarated grin crossing his face as he’s already higher than he’s ever flown with Teddy, forever worried about the boy falling. He’s been cruel, he thinks, maybe – but then he thinks that there’s seven years of Hogwarts and the rest of Teddy’s life for flying as Harry’s flying now, entirely reckless, already forty feet in the air, rising to a hundred and higher.

He thinks that he might hear his dad. _“Fuck me!”_ He’s very posh. His voice carries. Sirius is laughing.

When Harry first flew the Firebolt, all he really cared about was speed and acceleration. That’s mostly what he cares about now, because there’s around a thousand miles to fly, and they don’t intend to spend many of them at less than a hundred miles an hour, preferably two. They’ll be taking breaks – Harry’s dad’s in charge of that – because there won’t be much to do besides avoid birds and it’s likely that their concentration will lapse, but the intention is to arrive before the clubs are kicking people out.

Despite all this, Harry has matured a _little_ in the past fifteen years. He appreciates the broom’s gentility, the subtle resistance it offers as it turns, its hesitation, poised, before it sinks him into a dive – only a second, to let him know what’s coming.

And Harry’s forgotten how much he loves diving, shooting down like an apple to the earth or a cat from a tree with his stomach entirely inverted, shooting out of it the moment before he’s lost control and pulling into a loop and a roll, everything tingling as though he’s in love. He does it again, a second time and a third, brushing the grass which smells like freedom and soil, and it’s all just in case he needs to make an emergency descent, somewhere halfway down France. Obviously.

He lands on a corkscrew to the sound of someone calling him a show-off, maybe Ron. Sirius is looking at him with so much pride in his eyes that Harry thinks he might shatter. “Not bad, eh?” he suggests.

“It’ll do,” Harry manages, holding the broom upright and never intending to let it go. It belongs to him, definitely. He’ll take care of it.

Sirius gives him a look as though he can see straight through to his soul and he ruffles his hair, making Harry bat him off and complain.

“Oh Harryowl,” his mum is saying then, tutting as though he’s been daft. She’s running over to hug him, and it’s the second time in an hour; he’s being spoiled. “I’ve never seen anyone fly so beautifully.” Her eyes are witty and green. He needs to read her letters; they need to have a long chat.

“Excuse _me_ ,” his dad complains, holding the last performance broom that Ginny palmed off on Ron. It’s in perfect shape, really; Puds U changed sponsors halfway through the season a while back. “One of us won your hand with our skills on a broomstick…”

“As they say,” interjects Sirius, sardonic, making Harry titter.

Harry catches his dad’s eye as his mum lets him go. He’s scoffing until the moment they’re looking at each other – and then his hazel eyes flicker like insect wings, his jaw sets, and Harry’s struck by the impression that what his father really wants to do is burst into tears.

Harry lets him of the hook, pulling away so that his mum can say something cutting – likely grounding – about quaffles and theatrics. He lets his gaze drift to Ron and Hermione, who are giving him looks as though they’ve seen it all before. Ron opens his mouth and mocks a yawn.

“Git,” Harry tells him, a grin peeling over his face.

“Kreacher will be waiting for Master Harry’s return with Mr Lupin,” Kreacher croaks, and he’s clearly about to disappear, small on the edge of the decking.

Meeting his oil-slick eyes, Harry feels struck by intuition. Because – Kreacher must be the product of his influences, but that isn’t all he is. “He’s not going to replace you,” Harry tells Kreacher, meaning Moony, his chest bright and his fingers tingling, broom in his hand.

Because Moony’s a werewolf, Harry supposes, and Kreacher will have always been told that this means he’s not a wizard. But that must mean something else to Kreacher than it ever meant to Walburga Black.

“We’d never replace you,” Harry promises, looking at Regulus’s locket. “You’re ours.”

There’s something very guarded in Kreacher’s expression, maybe loving, maybe hateful, and it’s impossible to tell either way before he disappears with a _crack_.

“ _House elves_ ,” Harry complains to Hermione, who’s clearly trying not to laugh. Her eyes flick to someone else who always needs reassurance, and he’s lurking by the conservatory.

Draco’s face is essentially expressionless, pointy features and floppy hair, his mouth shut, his eyes impossible opals. But Harry’s chest is full of fire and his fingers are tingling and there’s a grin on his face, a bubble of laughter in his throat and a broomstick in his hand.

It takes no time at all to cross the grass and snatch up the front of Draco’s robes like a snitch, to feel and hear him inhale with urgent force before their mouths meet, an instant earlier than Harry expects because Draco pushes up close into him, burying a hand in his wind-battered hair. The kiss makes everything Harry’s feeling flare brighter, and it’s brilliant; he does it again, a third time, feeling that feeling of diving.

No tongues, Harry has to remind himself, keeping it clean.

The people around them make their presence felt as Hermione huffs, Harry’s dad brays and Sirius laughs at the chaos of it all. His mum lets out a wolf-whistle shrill enough to shatter Harry’s eardrums, followed by a cackle.

Harry imagines that Ron’s ears are turning pink.

Draco’s face is a bright pretty pink when Harry pulls back, his eyes a bright milky blue, his hair as blond as Luna’s. “You know you’re mine, right?” Harry tells him, feeling up his face, his eyes slipping to his mouth, which is perfect and red.

“I – am going to break my wrist, wanking over you,” Draco threatens him, his eyes already turning back to sharp silver.

“Why’s that?” Harry pushes, running fingers down his fastenings, his other hand tight on his humming red and gold broom.

“Because I love you,” Draco admits, his expression accusing, closing his fingers around Harry’s hand. “You fly like a starling.”

“A starling?” Harry fishes, kissing him again, sneakily. The rest of them are falling into chatter, good cheer. “Not an eagle?” He wouldn’t mind being an eagle.

Draco shakes his head. Poor thing, Harry thinks; he does look turned on. “Like I could catch you and keep you and you wouldn’t weigh a thing.” He glances over Harry’s shoulder. “And you look well in a flock,” he states, not really mocking.

This makes Harry breathe out, shuddering, because there’s still someone missing and they stitched him up into buying a painting. “Best get going,” he suggests, and he feels – ready to go.

Jaw tight, Draco nods, faffing with Harry’s face to take off his glasses and swap them for the sunnies in his pocket, pushing them up Harry’s nose. He casts a charm to make the glasses stay on, which is daft because it will be dark soon. He keeps touching Harry’s cheek and his jaw and his neck, and Harry feels how many weeks it’s been.

“I’ll see you later,” Harry promises, watching the blush fade from Draco’s skin, the forest-coloured shadows now cast on his face, always lovely.

For the first time, Draco promises him back, “I’ll see you.”

The next kiss they share isn’t goodbye; it’s because Harry wants to leave him weak at the knees. He’s accused of being inconsiderate.

* * *

For the rest of the evening, for most of the night, they fly south.

They make good time, and it’s dark and warm when they land on the beach, hours later. Harry’s been navigating with his compass and his map and his fingerless gloves, and with any luck they’ll have found the right island.

“Merlin, it’s hot,” Harry says to himself, surprised, his muscles aching as he slips from the broom. There are lights in the distance and the headlamp of Sirius’s bike is beaming bright as he descends; Harry has to squint as it blinds him, trainers sinking into sand. Above him there are hundreds of stars.

Because it’s hot, Harry slips off his jacket to free himself from his gloves and his Weasley jumper – a deep plum from last year. Sirius and his dad both land, the bike hovering an inch above the beach and cutting out to quiet.

There seems no reason to speak, because they’ve been silent for hours now, conversation drifting around the third leg. Harry bundles up his jumper and moves to put it in his backpack, the bag balanced on his broomhandle, oddly empty without ten years of stuff inside. He puts his jacket back on, because a sharp breeze is coming in from the sea and his blood will slow down soon to rest.

Sirius does the same next to Harry. He’s wearing black glasses of his own, aviators too. He hands Harry his black jumper and Harry thinks nothing of it, tucking the thing away. Sirius’s biker jacket is immediately back around his shoulders. He flicks up the collar for no reason at all.

“Dad?” Harry asks, and there’s a flash as Harry turns.

Harry blinks, startled, because his dad’s not holding a camera, but his wand, and he looks smug.

Before Harry can ask what he’s playing at, his dad’s switched his wand again to cast a patronus to the sand. It gleams glowing in the darkness, warm like the air – and it’s a leopard, Harry sees, pouncing to the beach. Its haunches rise as it turns to scowl at all three of them.

A grin crosses Harry’s dad’s face, to look at it. “ _Wife_ ,” he says, and Harry wonders if he’s run short of pet names. He sounds tired, but his expression is alert. “ _We’ve arrived safe and sound. Padfoot and the mophead are entirely unruffled – insufferable posers, the pair of them. I’ve captured the evidence._ ” He’s rolling his eyes and leaning on his broom as he finishes the message. “ _Get some sleep, and good luck. We’ll be home before you know it._ ”

The leopard yawns, showing its teeth, before it whips off into the darkness as though a thousand miles is nothing to cover at all, running down surf to the sea.

“What was that with the flashing?” Harry asks as the leopard vanishes, not thinking about who it could be.

His dad is smirking, when Harry looks at him. “Has no one explained to you how wizarding photography works?”

The answer to this is no.

“It’s a simple charm, to capture a memory,” expounds Harry’s dad. “The camera’s a rudimentary pensieve. It’s said that you get a more accurate picture by not using your wand, but that’s nonsense, theoretically…”

“So?” Harry asks.

“So,” his dad says, looking at him through his glasses, “don’t complain when people want to remember you.” He flicks his wand again and there’s a flash that makes Harry blink, his dad grin.

Harry casts his unicorn to the sand. It’s familiar; it makes him laugh. He misses the wolf a little – Harry can see its teeth in the sharpness of the unicorn’s horn, and he was horribly unfair to it, he thinks. “ _We’ve landed,_ ” he tells Draco, for now, and the unicorn’s eyes are insolent, all of it bright. “ _My dad’s awful. D’you know how to send him back?_ ”

This makes his dad laugh like a drain.

As the unicorn canters to a charge, to a blitz, to the night, Sirius lets out a sound of sheer boredom. “ _Potters,_ ” he addresses them accusingly.

He must have sent a patronus too, Harry thinks. He must have sent a dozen. He looks a lot like a poser in his black t-shirt and his black leather jacket, his sunglasses glinting in starlight. He’s crossed his arms and is sitting back against his saddle, hair swooping around his ears, tousled by the wind. The bike is grumbling a little, cooling down from the journey and spitting interruptions to the beam of its headlamp.

“Shall we get on?” suggests Sirius, as though he’s never experienced a feeling of urgency in his life.

Harry’s dad lets out another titter, his glasses uncool and square like the rest of his muggle outfit. The expression on his face suggests that he sees right through Sirius’s façade. “Might as well,” he allows idly, setting his broom to hover near Sirius’s bike, as Harry does too.

Because there’s only one way to find anything, really. They’ll be making a map, which is something that Sirius and Harry’s dad have done before.


	16. An adventure, part 5

The best map that Harry owns of Ibiza isn’t huge. It’s part of a guidebook for the Mediterranean islands, because he likes the idea of sailing around the whole sea on a boat. A small boat, cutting through high waves between ports, if not a yacht, so that Draco can drink wine and wear white and eat things off a plate.

They’ll need a few more maps, if they ever do anything like this. For now, the size of the map doesn’t matter, because there’s a much larger fold-up of parchment in Harry’s bag, along with a bottle of blue-black ink.

Harry’s never been able to imagine the ritual for making the Marauder’s Map. Not every step. Performing it on this beach, he’s certain that he couldn’t replicate it on his own. Here will be easier, he’s been told, because Ibiza is perfectly plottable, though there are a couple of variables which mean they’ll have to improvise (“Your dad enjoys worrying through details,” explained Sirius, not worried, long-suffering. “At the end of the day, all cast magic is an art. It’s a feeling. We’ll be fine.”).

They lay out the parchment on the sand – and it’s the size of a table top, when it’s unfolded – before Sirius takes the ink, unstoppers and pours it unflinchingly in a stream, the blue slopping and splashing over butter-coloured fibres, already alive.

“Fill that with seawater,” he tells Harry, handing him the heavy-bottomed bottle.

Before the ink has stopped running, Sirius draws his wand and holds up Harry’s touring map to the bike's headlamp. With sharp flicks of blackthorn, he’s then drawing out the blue into lines which trace the same shapes as the guidebook, an island emerging from stains, not terribly detailed for now.

It’s transfiguration, maybe, or a charm. It seems to take all of Sirius’s concentration, so with a nod Harry does as he’s told, running down to the sea – limping slightly, his flying muscles out of use. The water fills into the bottle with glugs.

When he gets back up the beach, the shape of the island and its main roads is complete. Sirius is working his way around the edge of it, drawing out ink from the boundary line into the slip-slide-dash of calligraphy – a rune, another, another, all an inch or so high, and then another underneath.

ᛚ ᛥ ᛡ ᛠ ᚾ ᛗ …

It takes Harry a second to realise that Sirius isn’t making up what he’s writing, but is taking instructions from Harry’s dad. He’s reciting the letter sounds in a steady voice as Sirius dashes them out, an equally intense look of concentration on his face.

Even as he continues to recite, as Sirius continues to draw, Sirius is giving Harry sharp instructions. “Trace that over these before the ink dries,” he says, referring to Harry’s water and the runes. “Remember,” he adds sophistically, and Harry’s always liked it when things are phrased this way, “you’re not tracing water to the ink; you’re tracing ink to the water.”

 _Oh, just like that,_ Moony would be saying now. It’s the same as carving wards into Grimmo’s deepest flagstones.

Harry’s dad is beginning the sequence again, and it’s maybe forty-nine runes long. “ _Lagu, stan, gēr, ēar, nȳd, mann…_ ”

_Ocean, stone, harvest, earth, binding, man…_

Harry can imagine the verse in his head. _As the sea binds the stone and the harvest is born from the soil, this binds each witch and wizard…_ He misses the way it continues.

With his wand set between the seawater and his hand, Harry holds a finger over the bottle’s mouth, crouching and concentrating to let a single drop fall on each rune, willing it to transfigure into the right shape and for the ink to meet it. It’s tricky, because salt loathes manipulation like this, but Harry’s cast a lot of wards in his time.

As carefully and as quickly as he’s able, Harry works his way around the border of the island. He stays crouched close to the beach, knees complaining, and by the end he’s hot and sweating under his arms, but he doesn’t run out of water and the ink doesn’t dry and all of the runes bleed into the sea.

Sirius is waiting, when he gets to the end. He nods as Harry stands up, and he throws a handful of sand to the centre of the island again. He flashes his wand, snapping something in Latin and he doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds like Minerva McGonagall.

The sand dashes into the lines of the map – the lines dash towards it – and there’s an explosion, loud in the night.

Harry’s dad has been silent since Sirius completed the runes, but he clears the smoke and the flames with a simple, “ _Finite_.”

There between them on the beach, the ink crawls to fill the parchment with detail. The runes at the edges of the island disappear.

The first time they tried this, Sirius told Harry earlier, his dad blew himself up (“ _You_ blew me up; the runes were fine.”). The second time, he managed to turn himself into a glowing beacon that could be seen on the quidditch pitch even from Gryffindor Tower (“It made winter training much easier. McGonagall told me that I was not allowed to leave it.”).

Here in Ibiza, the spell seems to work. Ink crawls into lines, finer and finer, until winking lights begin to glow from the map like stars, dotted in fragmented constellations. There aren’t too many, because magic can’t map muggles – but this is an island of thousands, and there are at least fifty witches and wizards or so. Harry’s attention is drawn to three of the lights in particular, grouped together on a northern beach. He reads the names sketching in underneath them, and his stomach turns over, to see those six words grouped together.

It’s like a dream. A very wonderful dream.

In the bottom-right corner of the map, in the sea, a legend appears, writing itself out in calligraphy.

_**Messrs PADFOOT and PRONGS  
and BABY HARRY  
welcome you to the Party Island of  
IBIZA**_

“ _Baby Harry_ ,” Harry reads to his dad, unimpressed. He’s been planning to keep this map for his collection, maybe with some names written in. The lights will fade in a few hours (“Sustaining the dots was the hardest part. In the end it took a full cycle of the moon.”).

“Don’t look at me,” his dad tells him on the beach, his eyes wide and guileless. “I do the grunt work.”

Frowning, Harry looks at Sirius, but Sirius is still wearing his sunglasses and looks like he couldn’t be ruffled if Harry tried. He’s also looking down at the map.

“Are those the same runes that you used for the Marauder’s?” Harry asks his dad instead, giving up.

“Oh no,” his dad says, his eyebrows knitting as though this makes no sense at all. “We’re in an entirely different part of the world. The difference between a boundary of water and a boundary of stone can scarcely be measured, and the relationship between Hogwarts –”

“So when did you come up with the sequence?” Harry asks.

His dad shrugs, and Harry remembers his conversation with Moony, the night before the memorial in May. “We’ve been in the air for hours,” his dad says, as though this isn’t interesting at all. “I needed something to keep me occupied.”

A wholly new sequence of forty-nine runes should take days. “How –”

“There –” interrupts Sirius, before Harry can ask another question.

Looking to where Sirius is looking, not far from a road going out of town into the mountains, Harry sees a winking light. He reads the name.

“Hmph, Remus _Lupin,_ ” complains Harry’s dad, with a glance to his wristwatch. “You should be in bed.”

“Easier for us,” Sirius reflects.

“Yes,” agrees Harry’s dad, and he sounds like a quidditch captain. “A pincer manoeuvre,” he suggests. “You go left and I’ll go right. Harry, our seeker,” he says, meeting Harry’s eyes with a grin. The glint in his expression is competitive. “You stay high in case he runs.”

Harry finds himself groaning as he returns to his seat. His broom hums to comfort him, and he feels some of his muscles relax.

* * *

They find Remus Lupin – Harry’s Uncle Moony – on a trail through scrub on the side of a mountain. He’s sitting by himself on a stone or maybe concrete bench as though it’s four o’clock in the afternoon. It isn’t. It’s gone four o’clock in the morning, and it’s pitch dark, because the moon is very new, though the stars are bright away from town. He’s holding flames in one hand, contemplating them, and Harry hopes that they’re an illusion, rather than the ones Draco’s told him really burn.

If it were the afternoon, Moony would be sitting in the shade of an ancient gnarled evergreen olive tree, the trunk huge and twisting, the foliage a heavy crown. From the glimmer of flame, Harry can see that it’s currently burdened with green fruit.

Moony is wearing a pair of black trousers and a short-sleeved shirt open at the collar, also black. He’s wearing sunglasses, no matter that there’s at least an hour until dawn. His hair looks golden in the firelight, and his face is freckly, more youthful than Harry’s been able to remember. The set of his jaw is poised and sharp.

He looks like he’s been working in a bar. He looks like someone Harry would have got off with in a nightclub, three or four years ago, still in denial about how deeply he’d fallen for one particular, much lighter blond.

On his broom, hovering silently in the shadows of taller trees, not far away, Harry watches his dad and Sirius park and then move to stalk their prey.

They close in a pincer, exactly as planned.

Sirius is wearing black too. “Babe, we clash,” is the first thing he says, ironic, sitting down on the bench.

Moony leaps out of his skin and Sirius smirks. The flames extinguish.

Harry’s dad casts _Lumos_ to hang like a lantern above them. He’s sitting on Moony’s right. “Hello Moony,” he says, grinning like a git and stretching up his elbows, twitching his glasses. “We’ve come to bother you.”

Moony looks between them, pulling sunglasses from his face as he blinks. “What the fuck are you two doing here?” he demands hoarsely, much too late.

“That’s not very nice,” reflects Harry’s dad, talking past him to Sirius.

“Horrid,” Sirius agrees, reaching around the back of the bench to tap Moony on the opposite shoulder. He jumps again, and Sirius’s smirk turns predatory.

“What –?” demands Moony, before he shakes his head. “Are you alone?” he changes the question.

With a sarcastic turn of the head, it’s clear when Harry’s dad gives him a cue. Harry swoops out of the trees and performs a dickish trick dismount, rolling from the broom to his feet. His mum’s not here, so he’s not worried about his reputation.

It makes his dad laugh with a titter down his nose.

“It’s only me,” Harry tells Moony. He’s not sure he’s any good at dramatic entrances. He’s also much less posh than either Sirius or his dad. It’s fine. “We made a map.” He holds up the sheaf of parchment.

Moony stares at him, a bemused frown pulling at his mouth. He glances at Harry’s dad and at Sirius. “It’s like the two of you have mated,” he comes out with, and he’s funny Moony, as well as being fit. He could have anyone.

Harry doesn’t want him. Not like that – and he can believe now that Moony doesn’t want him like that either. However it is that he flirts, it won’t be by being nice or helpful. That seems obvious, in the end.

Also, Harry’s forgotten that he’s wearing his sunglasses, but that doesn’t stop him twitching them up his face for effect.

Moony laughs, looking undone.

“I resent the implication that I would _ever_ –” begins Harry’s dad, apparently unable to handle this joke when someone else makes it.

“I got Lily up the duff; that’s what it is,” insists Sirius, guarding his emotions.

Moony says nothing, and Harry notes that the other two have lost points.

“So, go on, then,” prompts Harry’s dad, attempting to save face. “How have you been?”

“You know how it is, Prongs,” Moony reflects candidly, and Harry finds himself ducking his head. “It’s like every time one flees the country to escape the crushing feelings of inadequacy…”

Harry lets them chat it through. Moony’s been here for nearly two months, three weeks more than Harry’s been hiding at Hogwarts. He’s settled into something like routine. He has indeed been working in a bar, which Gary and Tone have been running since about the war’s end in 1998, while also staying in their spare room. They have a house in the mountains with beautiful views, which they bought when they moved here, before things got pricey, and they have an infinite number of stories from nights out, dating back to when Harry was a child.

“I should have been here all along, I sometimes think,” admits Moony fatalistically. “The music’s fantastic. I love EDM.”

Sirius gives him an extraordinarily sceptical, side-eyed turn of his head.

Moony says nothing, and Harry wonders if this is how he flirts, by making people question if they’ve ever known him at all.

And Harry imagines that these nights were likely mixed with many awful ones, with fights and bad vibes and hangovers. But he imagines that the stories are good, and maybe it’s the stories they should focus on.

“But what are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?” chides Harry’s dad, never scolding anyone for imagining abandoning the Order, abandoning Harry. “It’s almost five o’clock in the morning.”

“I like it here,” Moony says, glancing at the olive tree. “I always apparate here at the end of the night.” He’s being mysterious again. He jokes, “It’s on the first page of the _Polite Lodger’s Handbook_. Spend as much time as possible out of the house.”

“I’d’ve thought they’d install you in bed,” remarks Sirius, rather obsessed with this idea, Harry thinks. He’s still wearing his sunglasses.

It makes Moony laugh anyway. He looks at Sirius smugly. “They don’t do that sort of thing anymore,” he says opaquely, giving nothing away.

This makes Sirius huff, unsatisfied in his investigations.

“You haven’t looked into a place of your own, then?” Harry’s dad prods.

Moony’s façade falters, and he was definitely flirting with Sirius, Harry thinks. “Well,” he begins, looking at Harry’s dad.

While Moony demurs, Harry investigates the old olive tree.

He only knows about olive trees from what he’s read. The fruit is green now, with autumn; it will turn black and soft by December. It could be picked at any time, but will always need curing. The roots of the tree will spread wide and shallow, allowing it to survive in harsh conditions. It’s not a tree of its place, but it’s difficult to transport.

It’s a tree that promises peace, because it’s a tree that needs peace to grow. It’s almost self-sufficient, and it can adapt to survive many things, but it takes a good many years to settle and bear fruit. After that, when it’s ready, it offers more than anyone could ask for: fruit and oil to last all four seasons, every year, generous and kind.

In the branches of this particular tree, Harry spies the beady black eyes of a green, twiggy bowtruckle, woken up by the light cast over their heads.

Harry grins, because he’s always been good at finding rowan trees, but Luna’s never encouraged him to look for anything else.

They’re talking about Harry, Harry realises, when he tunes back into the conversation.

“I’ve never had Dumbledore so angry with me,” Moony’s saying, laconic, his mouth twitching as though he might be proud of the fact. “No one was supposed to find him. Not before 1991 and his much anticipated début.”

He sounds remarkably scathing and spiteful, but Harry’s taken up with Draco Malfoy, so it’s easy to let this wash over him.

“He told me about all sorts of things. A nebulous prophecy, which supposedly promised that Voldemort would come back. Lily’s protection, which required him –”

He swallows this point, and Harry imagines that they all think he’s occupied by the tree.

“Prongs, he was in that achingly middle-class town, and there he was looking like something that had crawled out of… He looked like _me._ ”

Harry’s dad doesn’t respond to this. In the corner of his eye, Harry sees him frowning, clenching his jaw and squeezing Moony’s shoulder as though to say that he understands. “Talk to Lily about it,” he suggests, glancing at Sirius. “I’m unreasonable.”

Moony scoffs, as though reasonable is the last thing that anyone could be. “And _then_ ,” he says, practically spitting, and this is different, Harry thinks, “Dumbledore told me that _Snivellus Snape_ was indentured to protect him.”

Now Sirius scoffs, sounding almost exactly the same, leaning over his knees.

“Snape!” spits Harry’s Uncle Moony. “ _He_ was allowed to be involved, but not the werewolf, no. I assumed that it had something to do with that ghastly pash he had on Lily, but it wasn’t good enough to have seen the boy born, to have –“

He screws up his face, and Harry opens up his mouth to intervene. Professor Lupin only ever told him that Snape needed to be trusted, and he’s pretty sure that Lupin and Moony aren’t two different people.

“He was in the castle, Dumbledore said,” Moony continues eventually, his teeth sharp, his eyes amber. “Playing teacher. You remember, Padfoot, all I wanted was to sell books or go travelling –”

“Hmph,” agrees Sirius, apparently unperturbed by anything in this story.

“Well,” concludes Moony, appeased. “If _Snape_ was teaching to have access, that’s what I would do too. I spent the next five years gaining qualifications, experience… That _awful_ run I did with Kwikspell…”

“Who?” asks Harry’s dad.

“Magic for squibs,” Moony says, stressing the contradiction. “Unashamed exploitation, but they paid well and it was done by correspondence.”

“Ah.” Harry’s dad clearly wants to say more, but he’s keeping his mouth shut.

Which means that Harry can’t help but interrupt. “You were the best Defence teacher we had.” Most definitely including Snape.

Moony looks at him, his amber eyes insolent and the smirk on his face as dark as the sky. “I owe it all to the Potions Master,” he says, and Harry’s sure that he’s lying. He’s going to feel badly about it in the morning, when he remembers that he’s nice. “I applied for Care of Magical Creatures.” He puts this accusation to Dumbledore, and it might well be true.

“Hagrid’s thinking of retiring,” Harry tells him no matter what. It’s mostly to demonstrate that he can’t be put off.

It makes his dad grin, a quick sound of laughter down his nose before he ducks his head.

“You could come back,” Harry pushes, and Moony’s staring at him, black glasses on his head. “There’ll be mums and dads who remember you, and more coming in for the next ten years. Me and Nev have fun,” he insists. The duelling club’s popular. “I mean,” Harry manages to find his point. “I always thought that I was taking after you. You’re the one I’m like.”

Moony looks at him, here in the Mediterranean night, and he doesn’t break down the way he did in May. He frowns. They all look at Harry, these three friends.

It’s Sirius who snorts first, and then they’re laughing as though this is the best joke in the world. “All right, Harry,” says Sirius, as though he sees straight through him.

“You’re your godfather,” insists Harry’s dad, as though nothing else could be possible.

“I always thought that you took most after Lily,” says Moony, contradicting his earlier remarks, flaring his eyes in challenge, as though Harry might be offended to take after a _girl_.

“Snape never thought so,” Harry comes back with, because this is something that he knows to be true.

“Yes, Harry,” Moony says solidly, and it’s as though they’re finally friends. “Because Snape was a twat.”

This makes Sirius snigger, content. He’s learned to keep his mouth shut about Harry being like his dad, Harry thinks, which makes Harry feel oddly sad.

At the same time, Harry isn’t sure about this line on Snape. “He was more than a twat,” he insists, resting his hand on the great trunk of the olive tree.

Moony scoffs, glancing at Sirius, and he’s thinking about the time when Snape tried to see him kissed by dementors, Harry’s certain. Harry tends to think about the time with Hermione and her teeth.

“That’s exactly what your mother would say,” his dad is telling him, narrowing his eyes with assessment.

“Frankly,” says Sirius, as though he’s bored. He’s crossing his arms. “I would be disappointed if you didn’t take after all four of us.” He’s looking at the other two on the bench, and then at Harry, as though he’s being entirely reasonable. “The last thing that anyone needs is the unadulterated speccy inheritance of James Fleamont Potter.”

Something inside Harry glows.

“That is uncalled for –” huffs Harry’s dad, not seriously, sitting straight.

“There’s clearly something more to him,” insists Sirius archly, on a wind-up. “He’s snagged one of my better cousins.”

“Yes, well –”

Harry refuses to let this slide. “Er, your _best_ cousin,” he corrects. He remembers something. “And what’s this thing about you asking him –”

“Malfoy is very fanciable, Padfoot,” Moony comes in with perfect timing, and Harry lets himself be interrupted, earning a wink.

There’s silence as the joke turns on Sirius. Harry’s dad cackles, and Sirius ends up pulling his sunglasses up his face, into his hair.

“He is _not_ ,” insists Sirius, sounding put out. “You don’t –”

Harry remembers this joke, Moony fancying Draco. It’s something that Sirius came up with when he first returned from the veil, to try and make Moony jump.

Moony seems willing to play now, and likely to win. “Why wouldn’t I?” he suggests, rather predatory, opaque. “He’s intelligent, articulate…”

“He’s fit,” Harry points out, hoping that he’s getting some sleep in time for tomorrow.

“He’s weedy and pale and flaxen,” Sirius insists, dark and muscular. Speechless, he taps his chest and looks openly desperate, to Harry’s eyes. Painfully uncool. He’s looking at Moony hopelessly and his expression softens how handsome he is. “You fancy _me_.”

Moony’s grin turns almost obscene, because he’s very much definitely won. “On occasion,” he suggests, as though he’s above it all, and he offers two patronising pats to Sirius’s knee.

“ _Ah_ ,” sighs Harry’s dad, as though this is all he’s ever wanted from existence. He puts his hands behind his head again, elbows cocky antlers. “Shall we impose on unwitting hosts and cause a scene?” he suggests.

“I’m shattered,” Harry agrees.

* * *

No one’s awake when they arrive at the house. Sirius goes with Moony to his room – to _talk_ , Harry’s told earnestly by his dad, while Harry raises his eyebrows, because it’s been a long time since 1995.

They end up sitting and talking themselves on the smart linen sofa until they can’t stay awake, and Harry swaps his sunglasses for his old round frames. The house is a two-bedroomed, single-storey modern sort of thing, with a relaxed open-plan living area, the floor patterned tiles. Shaped in an L, the sofa has its own space with no TV, next to unadorned, wall-high glass doors, which look out towards the pool and Harry imagines the open sea beyond.

“This is what your mum and I used to do in the final year of Hogwarts,” Harry’s dad is saying, slouching with his arms crossed. He looks oddly relaxed, as though for once he doesn’t feel on display. “We’d stay up downstairs and talk about nothing.”

Harry can imagine him in the common room, deep in an armchair by the dying fire, his mum holding her knees in another like an owl, both of them grinning at each other.

“Peter could sleep through an avalanche,” his dad is going on, in Ibiza, “but I needed a distraction from what I – to my dying shame – utterly failed to recognise as the fervent sticky web of unresolved romantic tension. It’s like tonight,” he tells Harry, looking over to Harry’s stretch of the L, glancing off towards the other rooms of the house. “But it gets worse, believe me. They used to have all day together on Thursdays.” He widens his eyes, as though Thursdays were a weekly trial. “Always let them have their good-night chat on their own,” he concludes with advice.

“They’re not chatting, Dad,” Harry points out, pushing his glasses up his nose and not thinking about it. “And who calls it _romantic tension?_ ” he asks instead.

“Leave me to my innocence,” comes the swift reply. Harry’s dad’s eyebrows are knit in a serious frown, as though he’s also trying hard not to think about it. “Anyway – she’s a terrible worrier, your mother,” he continues the story. “I used to fancy myself the only one who knew. I was rather conceited in those days, I’ll admit…”

It’s nice to listen to him, Harry finds, thinking that maybe Liz’s radio bosses know what they’re about after all.

As he starts to fall asleep, Harry thinks that he should be on the floor. His dad tells him to take off his shoes, make a pillow out of his jumper and go to sleep under his jacket. Cast a charm to make the cushions firmer like a mattress.

It’s like being in a tent with Hermione. Harry expects that he might have mapped all four of them wrong, though it was only a stopgap. He wouldn’t mind taking after any of them.

Doing as he’s told and shutting his eyes, Harry has a feeling as though his dad is watching him. There’s no flash, but it’s possible that he takes a picture.

On the cusp of sleep, Harry’s conviction escapes him. “Dad?” he can’t help but ask, opening his eyes to check that he’s here.

The sun is beginning to rise in the distance, an edge of blue working into black. The garden lights have been enough to see by, but it’s easier, now, to recognise that there’s a figure lying down the other stretch of the sofa, and it looks like something that Harry could see in a mirror. “Mm?”

“D’you think that Uncle Moony’ll come home?” Harry asks.

“That’s not to be thought about,” says Harry’s dad, and Harry shuts his eyes again, sinking into his thoughts. “We focus on the fact that we want him to.”

Harry dreams of Moony mocking them all at the upstairs dining table, fomenting dissent and then watching chaos unfold, dipping bread in his soup and swallowing it in two bites.

* * *

Much later the same morning – possibly the afternoon – Harry wakes to the smell and sound of frying bacon, beeps and steaming water. There’s music on, faintly, maybe the radio, playing pop.

“… accountant’s James Potter,” a man is saying, and Harry assumes that it’s Caradoc Dearborn. Gary. He sounds entirely unperturbed by their appearance in his living room. “Made of money, top marks in everything, good at sport, generous to a fault. Never not outgoing; interfering if he thinks you’re in trouble.”

“Terrifying, right,” comes the conclusion, ironic, presumably from Tone. The sound of his voice is muffled, accompanied by opening and shutting cupboards, and Harry assumes that he’s the one cooking.

They both have London accents, Harry thinks, a bit like the one that Pansy mocked him for having. Gary’s is different, though Harry can’t place how.

“Who’s the elfin older brother?” Tone comes out with next, and Harry forces himself not to startle. “He’s gorgeous.”

“That’s his _son_ ,” Gary mocks, complaining. “Get off –“ Something more squeaky: a fridge. “His name’s Harry. He’s too young for you. His mother’s stunning,” Gary adds, sounding jealous. “That’ll be where he gets it from.”

“Hm. And what’s his story?” asks Tone, as though he hasn’t been put off. There’s the sound of the toaster, interrupting the pop beats. Harry’s not sure if he’s fully woken up.

“The baddies wanted him dead as a baby,” Gary relates, and Harry supposes that this is accurate. “He thwarted that attack and every other since. Saved the world at the age of seventeen.”

“Ooh,” says Tone, ironic. “Gorgeous _and_ heroic.”

Not sure what to do with this, Harry resists the urge to scratch at and hide his grey hair.

“According to _John_ –” And Gary means Moony with this name, Harry’s sure. “– he’s taken up in recent years with one of the baddies’ sons, so…”

Harry opens his eyes. The world is a blur, but he reaches for his glasses on the floor as he sits up, unerringly fixing them on his face.

“…it’s a beautiful end to it all, really,” Gary finishes, looking surprised to find Harry glaring at him, not holding his wand because his dad’s right, they should take a stand on hexing muggles. Hexing anyone without a wand of their own.

Which is all very virtuous, but the thought escapes Harry immediately, and he blushes, because it turns out that Caradoc Dearborn is the gorgeous one. Stunning. Every other adjective. He’s as tall as Sirius or Moony, leaning against the big silver fridge with his arms crossed. His limbs are long; he’s wearing navy blue shorts with leather flip-flops on his feet, a white linen shirt half buttoned up and the sleeves rolled partway to his elbows. His hair is ruddy blond, tied back and long.

It’s streaked with grey, but who cares? Harry thinks desperately.

Smudges of old eyeliner turn Gary Dearborn’s deep blue eyes very round and he’s wearing _jewellery_ , gold, rings and a chain, as though he’s a pirate who’s going to take them away on his ship.

He looks a little bit like Neville, maybe, but not enough for it to be important. It also makes no sense, because Alice Longbottom is round-faced and much shorter and generally round, not angular and _tall_ …

“Well, that’s that, then,” says the other man in the kitchen.

Harry blinks, coming back to himself. Maybe he’s gay and not bi after all, he finds himself thinking, even though he knows that this thought never leads anywhere.

“I’m much too old for a love triangle.” Tone is smirking at him, holding tongs and a frying pan of bacon, and he’s normal-looking, thank Merlin. He’s wearing an orange short-sleeved shirt and he doesn’t have any hair left.

Ron’s is going thin at the back, Harry thinks. Lee Jordan shaves his head.

“Breakfast?” Tone asks Harry cheerily.

“Mm,” comes a sound from Harry’s dad, then, down the other leg of the sofa. He blinks, looking bleary, immediately sitting up, finding his own glasses on a table. “What is that wonderful smell?”

It’s awkward for all of twenty seconds. “ _James,_ ” Gary says, looking broken, guilty.

Harry’s dad puts his glasses on. “It really _is_ you, Dockers. Bloody hell,” he says, getting up and making Gary pull away from the fridge, slapping him on the shoulder and seizing his elbow, a greeting which Harry’s come to understand means that they weren’t terribly close, but they knew each other well, and Harry’s dad is fond of him, most certainly. “This is amazing,” he continues in an unusually sober tone, maybe because he’s still waking up. “Now I know how people felt when _I_ came back from the dead.”

Apparently this is all pitched perfectly, because it makes Gary laugh, his grin entirely teeth and easily worn guilt. It makes him look softer, less edgy – less attractive, which is helpful. “I’m sorry, James,” he says, and Harry can tell that his dad finds it unnecessary.

“Don’t be absurd,” is what he says, sounding posh. “None of us knew what we were getting into. Frank and I used to drink ourselves stupid, going over what we’d made you all sign up for.” This is the first word that Harry’s heard about it. He has no reason to believe it’s not true. “You’re happy, you’re safe and you’re alive,” his dad goes on, shrugging, glancing at Tone and the breakfast, the house. “What more could any of us have wanted?”

Gary ducks his head, before he looks up again. He seems to accept this forgiveness. “Is there really no hope for Frank and Al?”

“There’s always hope,” insists Harry’s dad. He and his mum have been looking in on them, Harry knows. At Gary, his dad points a finger, gently chiding, interfering, “And there’s your nephew, whom you should come and see.”

“You can stay in our house,” suggests Harry before he can stop himself, making Tone titter brightly.

Harry looks at him, and he winks, getting out plates.

It makes Harry fluster. “I mean –“ he continues, turning back to Gary and his dad, his eyes catching on deep-water blue. “I work with Nev,” Harry struggles through, making sense of what he means. “I see him every day. He likes to look in on our garden and complain about how crap it is.”

“Our garden’s Gaz’s pride and joy, innit, love?” Tone encourages, making Gary look away and something steely return to his expression.

“It’s only muggle plants,” he dismisses. “Wizarding plants are violent and particular.”

“A set of green fingers is a set of green fingers,” Tone says, as though that’s the end of the matter. He pulls cutlery from a drawer and promptly dumps it in a clatter on the worktop. “Siddown, wizards,” he commands, nodding at the chairs behind the counter.

They sit, and there’s lots of nice things for breakfast: bacon and toast and jam and cereal and fruit. There isn’t any tea, so Harry has orange juice, the taste of which he forgets is so bright.

“Sirius should be with us soon,” Harry’s dad says once they’ve started. He doesn’t make any claim for Moony, Harry notices. “He and Remus are, ah…” He grins awkwardly, his eyes twinkling. “Catching up,” he lands on when he’s not talking to Harry.

Gary and Tone have been content to stay standing, apparently, both where they were before. Harry’s been sitting on the urge to tell them that they shouldn’t eat on their feet. Now, at these remarks, they look at each other, bemused.

“Sirius is here?” Gary asks, turning back to Harry’s dad. It’s not clear he’s been told that Sirius has come back to life. Or even that he was dead. “Your best mate Sirius? Sirius Black?”

“Who’s Sirius?” asks Tone.

“Sirius is _gay?_ ” Gary catches on, laughing, all eyeteeth.

Harry looks at his dad, who looks back at him, eyebrows raised. The joke is clear, Harry thinks, and he finds himself sniggering.

“Oh, this is funny,” his dad says. “Moony, Moony Lupin,” he tuts, shaking his head as he looks at the ceiling. “We always find you out in the end.”

The thing is, even as Harry sniggers, his thoughts turn in another direction. “Has he mentioned Teddy?” he asks, to blank faces. “Nymphadora Tonks?”

“Ah,” his dad agrees, more shortly.

Before they can dwell on this, a door opens somewhere down the way towards the front door and a _very_ smug-looking Sirius emerges in black jeans and bare feet and a t-shirt that isn’t his, its colour an odd sort of grey-mustard yellow.

As well as not being Sirius’s, this t-shirt is too small, so when he stretches – because he’s yawning, reaching up – it reveals the muscles of his stomach and the fact that he has a lot of chest hair. The sleeves are short, revealing all of his arms. He looks windswept, Harry would say.

It’s because he’s not been expected, Harry decides, that Gary and Tone both stand up straighter, watching him sit down.

It’s not because he’s not been expected, Harry knows. He knows what it is. He refuses to think about it, because it’s _Sirius_.

“Sleep well?” asks Harry’s dad as Sirius takes his own seat at the counter, ruffling Harry’s hair and making him duck.

The slow grin on Sirius’s face makes clear that he would be wagging his tail, in another form. “I’ve been a good dog,” he tells Harry’s dad, low and sly.

There’s the sound of another door shutting – presumably the bathroom, which Harry could do with using. In the meantime, Harry wonders what it would take for Sirius and his dad to go back to sheltering him.

“All right, Dockers?” Sirius then asks, stealing a piece of Harry’s bacon. His tone suggests that nothing unusual has happened since the last time he and Gary met. He nods towards Tone. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

“Er,” begins Gary, looking discomforted and wide-eyed. It’s funny when it’s somebody else.

And Tone simply titters, a grin on his face which makes him look handsome. He’ll be Moony’s type, Harry thinks, so what’s that, a pentagon? “We haven’t had a morning like this in years,” Tone reflects, sounding as though he’s enjoying it.

“You feeling outnumbered?” Harry asks his dad. He misses Draco, who would have said something cutting by now.

“I’m always outnumbered,” Harry’s dad replies, his expression amused behind his glasses. He’s clearly missing Harry’s mum, but he makes a joke anyway. “It makes me feel special.”

* * *

They go for a walk in the mountains, along the path from Moony’s bench and his tree. Sirius tells them that this is the plan, and somehow Moony only emerges when it’s already time to go, everyone showered and dressed. He and Sirius take the motorbike, to a catcall from Tone while Harry’s dad pretends to wipe a tear from his eye. Sirius revs the engine; Moony ignores them as they drive off, saying something that makes Sirius laugh.

The rest of them pile into a car, a silver 4x4 which makes Harry miss the BMW from France. “This’ll be a novelty for you,” Tone suggests, putting the thing into gear, sporty skiing sunglasses on his face, the lenses iridescent.

“I’ve driven a car,” Harry disagrees, even as his dad agrees yes.

“You mean that you can drive,” Gary asks him over the back of the seat. His glasses are round, tortoiseshell and brass, elegant, like Draco’s should be. He’s wearing boat shoes now, Gary Dearborn, as though he’s ready to lounge around on a yacht.

Shaking himself, Harry shrugs. “I mean that me and Draco hired a car. Went down France. It was nice.”

Tone grins and offers a throaty laugh. “I love wizards,” he says, seemingly unconcerned by the idea that he could meet an illegal first-time driver on the road, their car charmed half alive.

Gary snapped his own wand in final days of 1979, it comes out on this car trip. Harry’s dad was missing; he found out that his sister and his oldest friend were planning to have a baby. He couldn’t bear to find out how the story would conclude. He went to ground, and it wasn’t hard, because he’d already been living a double life. “It seems mad now,” he says, “everything I got up to. Even Frank never knew.”

“It sounds like a lot,” agrees Harry’s dad sympathetically.

“We left school five years before you four,” Gary reflects before correcting for Wormtail. “You three.” Harry’s dad waves him off. “It feels like we left to a different world.”

“Don’t say that around Sirius,” warns Harry’s dad. “He’ll start talking about _Johnny Rotten._ ”

“Gaz saw one of the Pistols’ first shows,” Tone chimes in, driving them through the sun. Harry wonders if he’ll let Harry drive them home. “It’s his claim to fame.”

“Sid Vicious threw up in my squat,” insists Gary, still looking like a warm-hearted pirate. “It was five years before I was there, but he ruined the carpet.”

“When did you decide to stop running?” Harry asks, and the question comes out more bluntly than he means it to.

“It was when we moved here,” Gary says with a gentle smile, as though he understands the question perfectly. “I needed a passport and I couldn’t keep living on cash. I applied under Caradoc and I knew that it was possible that someone would find me, besides John, but no one came looking.”

“Moony’s good at keeping secrets,” Harry’s dad points out. He’s the only one without proper sunglasses; he’s tinted his normal glasses an uninteresting shade of grey-brown. “Padfoot less so,” he apologises.

Gary waves an elegant hand in dismissal.

“Moony has to come back to see his son,” Harry says now, rather hotly, because that’s now been explained and he’s keeping his focus on the point. It’s what they forgot, up in Hogsmeade, and Harry refuses to forget it a second time.

“I wouldn’t phrase it that way,” suggests Tone nonetheless.

Harry’s dad makes an uncertain sound. “It’s going to be difficult not to be short with him,” he says. He’s frowning, and his jaw sets. “He won’t let on, but Padfoot will be hurt, if he’s been taken to bed as distraction. They haven’t before now,” he explains, vaguely towards Harry, as though he can be certain of knowing. Harry supposes that Sirius’s appearance at breakfast has burnt any bridge back to comforting ambiguity. “Not since he came home. He’s been looking forward to it.”

This makes Harry feel low, though he’s not sure that he needed the last detail.

“John’s always had a ruthless streak,” Tone reflects, without judgement.

“Mm,” agrees Gary.

If there’s a story to this, Harry thinks, he doesn’t want to know.

The view from the mountains is breathtaking, really. The sky is bright blue and the sea is even bluer. The bushy flora around them gleams a waxy green and the sandy, rocky path is golden yellow. Trees jut out from the crags at odd angles, the trunks and branches spiking like lightning bolts.

It’s terribly hot for the last days of September, and Harry’s glad of his greeny-brown aviators. He gets his dad to take a picture of them both with Gary and Tone on a cliff.

Moony is walking with Sirius, lagging behind, and there’s the sound of Sirius snickering as though he’s enchanted. The distraction is clear now, and it winds Harry up.

His dad gives him a look, and it’s easier, to know he’s not alone.

A patronus appears not long after the photo – a mastiff, which Harry’s dad tells him is almost certainly his Grandfather Evans, who was always a gruff old curmudgeon.

“ _Dockers!_ ” it exclaims in Harry’s mum’s voice. “ _It’s so lovely to see you._ ”

The dog seems to woof, as though in agreement with itself, looking at Gary.

“ _Thank you, thank you and that handsome chap you’re with for looking after Moony. We’ve been so worried about him. And I hope that no one’s been a nuisance,_ ” the message goes on. “ _You can tell James that he’ll answer to me if he oversteps his welcome. You should come over for Christmas, or Halloween. Or we can come and see you if you don’t fancy the cold?_ ”

The dog seems to woof again, turning. By the cold, Harry’s sure that his mum means anything to do with the UK.

“ _James,_ ” the voice then says more harshly – and it’s all defensiveness, Harry thinks. Self-protection. He sees that now. “ _Don’t let yourself get distracted. And Harrymo, put on your sunscreen; I know you’re not wearing it._ ” His mum tuts, making Harry startle. “ _Lots of love and kisses now,_ ” the voice rounds off to all of them, the dog running between them, ready to be off into the light. “ _See you all soon._ ”

Gary looks moved, even in his sunglasses. Tone pats him roughly on the back.

“She has something on today,” says Harry’s dad apologetically, not at all as though he’s worried about it, even though Harry’s sure that he is. “We’re on a serious mission,” he insists, as though explaining why he didn’t stay behind, looking over to where Sirius and Moony have stopped by a tree.

Moony is looking towards Lily’s voice.

“And _are_ you not wearing your sunscreen?” Harry’s dad asks. It takes Harry a moment to realise that this is aimed at him. He showed his dad the charm to put some on his nose before they left.

Now Harry blinks. “It’s fine,” he insists. “It’s late in the year.”

“Mm,” says Harry’s dad, narrowing his eyes as though calculating the trade-off between pushing it and being told off at home.

Harry’s not sure how to tell him that with the number of times he burned as a child, he’s likely destined for skin problems, no matter what. He’s a wizard; he’ll get it sorted at St Mungo’s.

Looking over Harry’s shoulder, Harry’s dad seems to realise that Moony and Sirius have stopped talking, for the moment. He gives Harry a glance, which is basically an instruction. “Padfoot!” he calls, making Sirius look up. “Tone wants to see some magic; d’you fancy a run?”

“Prongs,” laments Sirius, as though he wants nothing more, “this terrain isn’t suitable for you.”

“Some of us have a summer coat,” throws back Harry’s dad.

“What’re you talking about?” asks Tone, with anticipation.

“Oh!” says Gary suddenly. “This is a story I’ve heard.”

With a risen pair of eyebrows and a twitch of his glasses, Harry’s dad grins and turns into a stag. It’s familiar, because Harry’s been seeing it every other morning for weeks.

His stupid dad, he thinks fondly.

With ruff and a bark, the stag is joined by a great black dog, Harry’s other protector, and they go running off like children, scrabbling up the hill in a race.

“So when he was saying…” Tone begins, looking startled. He’s talking about Sirius calling himself a good dog.

“Best not to dwell on it,” Harry suggests.

Tone seems to accept this, here in the sun. “Can every wizard do the same?” he asks.

Harry lets Gary take the question, leaving them for Moony by the tree.

“Hullo Uncle Moony,” Harry addresses him.

“Hello Harry,” he says, and it’s the first time that they’ve been alone in what feels like forever. He’s wearing his sunglasses, but Harry imagines that there would be a hard glint to his eyes, which are the colour of firewhiskey. “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” he tries, warm and kind.

“I bet you never go out in the daytime,” Harry accuses, not meaning to be short.

Moony sighs, looking off towards the sea. “You must be awfully upset with me,” he suggests, encouraging him to feel it. To get it over with. To reveal it. He said the same thing to Sirius in his first letter of 1994.

“We’ve done this before,” Harry says with control, determined to do better than the time in 1997, in number 12, Grimmauld Place, when Harry ended up jinxed.

It takes Moony a moment – but then, “Yes,” he agrees dully. “I’m afraid –”

“My patronus turned into you,” Harry interrupts whatever this statement was going to be.

Aghast, Harry thinks, Moony looks at him.

“I found the you inside myself,” Harry mocks, trying to recall what Dumbledore said about the stag. “Bit crap,” he reflects, and Moony huffs a sound that’s disbelieving. “It’s no fun being you.”

“No it isn’t,” Moony agrees, as though he’s not sure what to say.

“But I made it to a decade,” Harry points out, crossing his arms in the warm sun. “And there were times when I thought that I wouldn’t. So there it is.”

Really, when Harry looks back, he’s not sure how he did in fact survive his life after Hogwarts. He doesn’t remember the first time he had sex, and the fact fills him with shame every time that the thought strikes upon him. He used to go out every Friday with Dan and Gawain, the Hufflepuffs from work, but they’d lose track of him, or get bored of him, and there was a Saturday he woke up in Regulus’s room with a deep wound in his foot – he thinks from a stiletto heel. His jeans were undone and his boxers were a mess, and he felt certain of what the clues added up to.

His wand was in his hand, naturally. Nothing was splinched. It used to happen often, and Harry’s not sure why.

By 2004, when Draco appeared in his office, Harry thinks, if he had to guess, he was going out looking to be used. He’d convinced himself that being used was all he was good for. It didn’t feel like that at the time.

On a warm sandy cliff in Ibiza, Moony looks as though he wants to say something, but doesn’t know what. Harry thinks about the final years of the war, the way that Moony didn’t survive, and he wonders if Moony lost his patronus to Sirius or to Tonks. To Teddy, even.

This question’s likely too personal, Harry thinks, so he tries something else.

“I’ve been thinking about the invisibility cloak,” he says, because it’s been with him since the age of eleven. “Have you ever read that story? The tale of the three brothers, in Beedle the Bard.”

“I’m familiar with it,” Moony allows. “I was raised on Little Red Riding Hood,” he adds, with the slightest of sarcastic smiles. It looks warm and self-deprecating, mostly.

Despite himself, Harry snorts. “It’s supposed to be the good one,” he explains about the cloak. “The first brother wants to wield Death’s power, so he gets the wand; the second wants to make Death powerless, so he gets the stone. The third only wants to put him off for a bit, and that’s why he gets the cloak. He lives a long life, and when it’s done he greets Death like an old friend.”

“How lovely,” says Moony, as though he might be anticipating Harry’s point.

“Exactly,” Harry says, looking around them, at the sun. This beautiful place is where Gary started living, but Moony’s only here to hide. Harry knows what hiding looks like. “It’s rubbish. Death’s no one’s friend. The third brother must have ended his life a lonely old git, if he felt like Death was his. That’s what being invisible does.”

“I understood that the third brother had a family –”

Harry gives Moony a sharp look, because he’s being obtuse. “You can have a family and keep yourself invisible,” he says.

With a forced breath, Moony clearly tries not to react, but he doesn’t quite smile and he doesn’t quite frown, and Harry fears that he might have made him cry again. His hair is golden in the sun, but his age shows as he swallows.

“You knew exactly what you were doing,” Harry tells him, “when you made me Teddy’s godfather.” There’s a feeling of betrayal in his chest, and he lets it burn. “I don’t think that you had any intention on making it out, deep down.” He’s sure that this is how the clues add up. “But then you did, in a way,” he points out, “and now we’re here. Again. Right where we were before.”

Moony says nothing, crossing his arms and breathing with one sniff.

“Here’s the deal,” Harry tells him, to be fair. “You can come home now, or you can tell us when you’ll be home by – Halloween or Christmas or whenever, I don’t care. But you’ll be making a promise, and that promise will either be kept or be broken.”

It strikes Harry that this is the exact opposite of Luna’s suggestion in Madam Puddifoot’s, but Moony was never in Ravenclaw, and neither was Harry, and Harry doubts that Teddy will be either, so in the end he’s not bothered about it. He thinks that he can persuade Andromeda that this will get her what she wants, which is a child with an unbroken heart. She’ll be flexible on methods if he can get her that.

“If you keep that promise, then I’ll let you be my godson’s dad,” Harry decides, meeting Moony’s eyes as well as he can through their sunglasses. Because Teddy will always be Harry’s, no matter what. “You can spend proper time with him, get to know him. Auntie Dromeda reckons that you should give him some pre-Hogwarts lessons,” Harry suggests. “That can be your way in, if you like.” He smiles, and he hopes that he looks like a man who killed another when he was a boy. “I mean, I know that you only ever took up teaching because of –”

“All right,” Moony interrupts, not saying more, not promising anything yet. He looks like he regrets what he said in the dark. Good, Harry thinks.

“If you break your promise, I’ll step in,” Harry goes on, not trying to threaten him, or guilt-trip him, or any of the other things he used to find himself doing, unthinking. “Whether it’s now or in the future. Maybe I won’t let you talk to Teddy on his own,” he suggests. “Maybe I won’t let you see him until he’s seventeen. I dunno what’ll be fair, because it’ll depend on what you do,” Harry acknowledges. “But you don’t get to know the rules at that point,” Harry emphasises, because he saw what Moony was like in the pensieve. “And I will enforce them.”

There’ll be no way for Moony to trick his way through on a technicality, is what Harry means. He’ll either keep his word or he won’t. It’s a Gryffindor thing, honour.

Holding his mouth closed, Moony’s saying nothing, arms crossed. But he’s not looking away.

Harry’s not looking away either.

Finally, Moony sucks in a breath which seems to shudder through him. He’s shaking his head, stepping away, looking to the sea. “I have nothing to offer him,” he says, talking rubbish, and it breaks Harry’s heart.

“You’ve found him an amazing olive tree,” Harry corrects gently. This isn’t a bollocking, after all, Merlin knows. It’s a deal. “There’s a bowtruckle living in the branches; I saw it last night. We’ll get it to give us two of them, I’m thinking.” He means the branches, for wands.

Teddy’s life is the story of peace, Harry thinks – the way that his own once might have been. Something adaptive, less fragile as it grows. Moony, on the other hand, needs peace desperately. He doesn’t need a wand with the same wood as Draco’s Mysteries desk, where he wrote up the workings of the Killing Curse.

“I found him this,” now Moony confesses, his lies instantly collapsing. With his cypress wand he conjures something which he must have been keeping at Gary and Tone’s house.

It’s a feather, long and swooping, all tendrils like chrysanthemum petals – clean, warm white like the heart of a flame. It’s a phoenix feather, Harry knows, feeling struck, no matter his age.

In white, it’s a feather from a phoenix hen. They’re plumed in this solid colour, soft and bright like fluffy clouds, all the books say – just as vivid as the bright red and gold of the cocks. They sing beautifully, they’re protective and they’re loyal to the day of death and beyond.

“Where did you get that?” Harry asks, most likely sounding young. His fingers reach to touch it.

“She must live around here somewhere,” Moony tells him, looking to the mountains. “I found it on my bench, when I woke up after the August moon. I’d chained myself to it,” he admits, and Harry doesn’t comment on this. He’s twirling the quill, so that the feather ruffles and gleams in the sun, entirely magical, magnificent. “I was terrified that I’d eaten her, or wounded her –”

“You won’t have done,” Harry tells him, watching the feather. A phoenix could take down a werewolf, he’s sure. “I’ve seen a phoenix take down a basilisk.”

Moony doesn’t comment on this. “I was so sure that he would like it,” is all that he says, meaning Teddy.

“He’ll _love_ it,” Harry says, meeting Moony’s eyes through his sunglasses, the shape just about visible in the sun.

“It reminded me of his…”

He’s talking about Teddy’s cuddly phoenix, Fawkes, which flies and caws and burns to a chick in the illusion of rainbow flames. A retail product rather than a prototype from Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, Fawkes is Puff’s more docile cousin. Less grumpy – and he consumes much less sugar.

Although – George always says that he didn’t change much between the prototype and the product for the shop. Puff’s neediness is mostly his own, rather than a flaw.

It’s possible that Harry prefers Puff that way. He needed something to love, once upon a time.

Moony is looking off towards the horizon again, here in Ibiza, guarded and frowning.

“Every time I think about not coming home, I think about the fact that I won’t be able to give it to him,” he says about the feather, spinning it again in the light, looking down. “I think about what Dora would say,” he goes on, looking towards the horizon. “And then I think about the fact that she never did stand up to me, and it’s likely that she wouldn’t say a thing.”

“You’re being unfair,” Harry points out, but he doesn’t lose his temper.

Moony screws up his face, looking bitter. “Sirius has always been the worst dog,” he tries again, scornful, looking down. “The barest hint of affection and he’ll eat right out of your hand. I’ve always known how to play him –“

“Oh, shut up,” Harry interrupts casually, making Moony startle. “You’re not some mastermind. You didn’t sleep with him before because you were nervous, and then last night you were happy to see him, so you forgot.” It’s exhausting, this particular merry-go-round, but Harry knows how it feels.

The accusation makes Moony huff, wrinkling his nose – which makes him look very fit, here in the sun, all freckles. He’s Harry’s fit friend, he thinks, letting his perspective skew. Everyone has one, Harry’s sure. He’s ended up with too many, but there’s not much that he can do about that.

“Luna’s ready to start making wands all the way through,” insists Harry, distracting himself, talking to the side of Moony’s head. “You’ll remember Luna –”

“I know who Luna is,” Moony scoffs, giving himself away. “She’s all Draco talks about,” he says, making Harry’s heart rush with basic jealousy. “We have the same name!” complains Moony, and, all right, that’s funny. “I _died_ ; I didn’t –”

Harry interrupts, before he can go on. “The whole thing’s dead interesting,” he says, and everything comes to him, the rush switching to excitement. “I can see it,” he describes, the path in his head like a map. “You’ll come home,” he suggests. “We’ll show Teddy the feather and the branch and a picture of the tree. It’s half-term soon,” he points out, “so we could come back for a couple of days.”

Frowning, Moony is spinning the feather and looking like he’s imagining it too.

They might even see the phoenix, Harry thinks, though it’s very unlikely. He could at least see Draco in the sun again. “Luna will whittle,” he goes on, “and we’ll watch that; it’ll be educational. And then we’ll watch her set the core and finish off. The varnishing takes ages,” he adds just in case Moony doesn’t know. “But Teddy’ll have a wand in time for Christmas.”

“What if it doesn’t choose him?” Moony asks, swallowing, always so negative.

Harry loves when he knows exactly what to say. “It already has?” he spells out.

Tittering, Moony dashes fingers underneath his sunglasses. Harry doesn’t mention it. “I might keep my dragon core,” he suggests, taking Harry’s hint about the olive. “It was the only thing that my own useless father gave me.”

Harry remembers the story. “He gave you more than that,” Harry chides.

Looking at him, frowning, Moony sniffs.

“He gave you you,” Harry tells him, to be trite, grinning as winningly as he knows how.

It makes Moony laugh, despite himself.

“I mean, you’re all right,” Harry pushes. “Bit flakey,” he allows, to sound like his mum.

Ducking his head as though he’s overwhelmed, Moony vanishes the feather and tucks his old wand away. “I should have found a way to keep you,” he says, wiping his eyes again and sniffing. “I should have been there when you needed me.”

“I’m a handful,” Harry tells him, shrugging. “And it’s come out somewhere all right in the end.”

“I never told anyone, before that wretched boyfriend of yours,” Moony says, in confession, and it leaves Harry surprised, for a moment. “I wouldn’t have known how to make you the first. I should have found a way anyway… Harry, your godfather and I are involved,” he comes out with in one breath. He says it like bad news. He breathes as though he wants to be sick. “We’ve been carrying on for years –”

“Right,” agrees Harry, nodding solemnly.

“I needed to know that I could walk away, the moment that my association reflected on either of you –”

“That’s a stupid reason,” Harry suggests.

Shaking his head, the muscles of Moony’s face are drawn tight. “I had nowhere to live for most of your childhood; I spent a lot of time essentially trading sex for cocaine –”

Harry blinks, but he knows what to say, because it’s true. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I imagined how you’d blame me, for leaving him in Azkaban. In that _house_.”

Harry looks at Moony through the brown-green lenses of his sunglasses. “I told Dumbledore I blamed him,” Harry allows. “But I didn’t mean it really.”

“I never knew you very well,” Moony explains, with a sniff. “And then it was too late.”

Sighing, Harry finds that it’s easy, in the end, to let the past go. “We can only deal with what’s next,” he concludes.

This makes Moony laugh, just a little.

Harry waits.

Hesitation. “You’ll hate me for saying this,” Moony points out eventually, “but you sound so much like your father sometimes.”

“Oh, I was trying to,” Harry admits, and Moony looks up. “He does good pep talks.”

The fact of this sits between them for a bit. And then, out of nowhere. “I – I’m very much in love with him.” It seems important to Moony, to say it.

“My _dad?_ ” demands Harry, to be obtuse.

“No, not your _dad_ ,” Moony scoffs, looking away. He tilts his head to his shoulder. “Though maybe a little, when I was fifteen… He used to play quidditch remarkably well –” He cuts himself off, and Harry’s not sure if he’s joking. “I mean monsieur Black,” says Moony then, with a self-mocking frown, lamenting. His gaze trails off towards the cliff path, and he sighs. “The edgy one, with the arms and the leather and the dark sense of humour.”

“I’ve never understood _arms,_ ” Harry tries to make him laugh. “As a thing.”

But Moony only raises his eyebrows. “Your loss,” he comes out with. “You might not know this,” he goes on, still mocking himself, “but your godfather is as loyal as anything, even if he doesn’t always know the line. He’s intelligent and artistic and resilient…”

“Like a dog, then, mostly,” Harry points out. “A dog who likes art.”

“ _Exactly_ like a dog,” Moony agrees, as though this hasn’t been established. “A dog who happens to be a very attractive man, even after he’s spent twelve years in prison.” _How was I supposed to resist?_ seems to be the general implication, though Harry’s still not sure that this argument is persuasive.

Harry knows what to say here, nonetheless. “I’m glad that you feel that way,” he accepts, here in the Mediterranean sunshine. He meets Moony’s eyes behind his sunglasses, clamping down on his grin. “I mean, you’ve stolen his virtue. So – what are your intentions now?”

For a moment, the man looking at Harry seems startled. Then he catches on, and a slow smirk spreads across his face. “Draco told you,” he realises, freckly.

“Yep.” This accusation is apparently _exactly_ what Sirius said to Draco. He can’t have meant it how it sounds, but it’s still hilarious, as far as Harry’s concerned. “My _virtue_ ,” he repeats.

Moony huffs a short laugh, shaking his head. “He’s an idiot,” he says fondly, meaning Sirius, and Harry thinks they’ve said all that they need to on that. “Did Draco tell you his reaction?”

Harry thinks about it. “No, he didn’t,” he realises.

And Moony’s impression is ridiculous. “I did not _steal_ his _virtue!_ ” he exclaims camply, capturing Draco’s accent exactly, waving a hand towards the sea. Harry’s heart swells. “How could anyone steal _Harry Potter’s_ virtue? He is _entirely_ virtue; what would be left? If anything, _he’s_ the one who’s stolen from _me_. My _sanity_ , from the age of fourteen, and now he’s moved in he’s out to _drive_ me _over_ the _edge_.”

Imagining it, Harry bursts out laughing. Moony grins back at him. “He’s can’t help being daft,” Harry allows. “He’s like a helicopter, or a Fizzing Whizzbee. I’m not allowed to call him dramatic,” he adds.

“Pity,” is Moony’s wicked reply.

They’re both of them still laughing when the stag and dog come back down the bluff, Gary and Tone commentating the race, or something like that.

“What’s so funny?” asks Sirius suspiciously, looking between them, a man again.

“Your virtue,” Moony tells him adroitly, holding out a hand, which makes Harry’s dad snort. Gary says something too, and all three of them are laughing, further up the path. “Come and gaze into the Med with me,” Moony softens the blow as Sirius approaches to take his hand.

He narrows his eyes at Harry, who gives him an innocent look.

“If I have to come back for the British winter,” Moony says, “I want my sun and sea now.”

And that’s a promise, Harry decides, because he’s the one making up the rules.

“I’ve never understood gazing at the sea,” Sirius is saying, and he’s being very slow to catch on, Harry thinks. “It’s boring as all mercy; it’s water.”

Harry looks at the sky, and then finds a way to extract himself back to his dad and Gary and Tone.

Because – _“Do shut up, you unfeeling hound,”_ Moony tells Sirius, surely turning into their hands and kissing him in romantic silhouette, the sun beating down.


	17. A party

On the thirty-first of October, 2008, twenty-seven years on from the night when a man broke into a house, and a boy lived, it’s Friday.

Friday night has long been party night for the boy who lived in 1981, but this Friday party night is special. For a start, the boy who lived – who is a man now, living – intends to enjoy the night from start to finish. He intends to have his close friends around him from the moment he arrives until the time he leaves, and he doesn’t expect to escape at any point to find Draco Malfoy, because he intends to never once lose track of him.

The party is conceived a month in advance. It doesn’t take long to put the plan together – the idea comes to Professor Harry Potter entirely whole, in the middle of marking the Gryffindors’ essays on redcaps.

They’re quite good, the Gryffindors’ essays. They’ve all understood the basic point about redcaps, that they’re the product of hate, which charges spilled blood.

The task was to decide and explain how an infestation should be dealt with. Being Gryffindors, these third years have all taken the most direct line of attack. Return to the source, they say, in paragraphs of varying length and precision, till the battlefield and plant something nice with roots that’ll clear out the blood.

They’ve not read around the textbook – there’s no Hermione among Harry’s third years, this year – so Harry is telling each of them in turn in a scribble to consider what they’ve been learning in Herbology, the principles of purifying earth, and so what sort of plant would be best. There are at least a dozen reasonable options, which the Gryffindors are going to find extremely frustrating, because they’ll have to think, and the thought of it is making Harry grin.

He thinks of his own Gryffindors, reading these essays. Hermione doesn’t like loose ends and his mum, it turns out, has a slightly twisted sense of humour once you get to know her. Their plans for Malfoy Manor make a lot of sense. There’s something that tickles Harry’s mum, Harry’s gathered, reading in-between the lines, about taking Harry’s dad to Voldemort’s bed, and Harry hasn’t asked further about it, because he doesn’t want to know.

Instead, Harry asked Draco where Tom Riddle slept, when they were crossing over and and wrapped around each other in Harry’s slightly small Hogwarts bed, as September turned into October.

“Where do you expect?” was Draco’s reply. “In the state rooms,” he said.

“What’s that mean?” Harry asked.

Draco sighed in disgust, and Harry knew that it wasn’t at him. “Old houses like ours used to keep their best rooms for the king,” he explained. “Father liked to think of himself as an earl from the War of the Roses.”

“Hm,” agreed Harry, not saying anything about Draco’s father. “Is that the one with the Princes in the Tower?”

It made Draco laugh. Although Harry was right, or near enough, he found out when he looked it up.

Now, Harry will always be Godric’s man, but he likes to see himself as the Sorting Hat these days, when he teaches Defence against the Dark Arts: a beaten-up, worn sort of thing who cares less about inter-house rivalry and more about putting things in the right place. Doing things in the right order.

State rooms or no state rooms, the manor is a place that was taken, once upon a time – and then kept through force in Slytherin-on-Slytherin internecine brutality. Harry knows what _internecine_ means, because he’s looked it up in the dictionary, and it doesn’t mean anything good. They can’t take from each other. It wouldn’t mean anything to take the house back the same way that Voldemort took it, for Ron and Hermione to set themselves down its aisle or for Draco to install Harry’s mum and dad as queen and king.

“It belongs to the elves,” Draco has said. He left it to them as a squat.

And the elves will be happy with whatever they do, Harry knows, because they’ll never give up on the dream of the house. They’ll always remember when it was nice, long ago. Maybe centuries, or before it was built. But they’ll also believe that the house belongs to its son, Harry thinks, and that it can’t be given or lent away until he’s made sense of its possession.

It’s the job of witches and wizards, really, to make the manor nice again, living as they do in the present. That’s one of the arguments Harry makes in his lesson on redcaps, because sometimes students think that it should be the redcaps’ job.

Marking the Gryffindors’ essays, the first Friday in October, an idea in his head, Harry looks up. “Draco,” he says, looking to a mirror which is round with a frame of soaped ash, hung off to the side from the desk. It doesn’t go with any of the furniture in Hogwarts, and it fills Harry with calm happiness, to see it here amongst the red and green, stone and iron.

For a moment, the mirror shows Harry the door to his Hogwarts bedroom and then it shows the bedroom of his and Draco’s flat in number 12, Grimmauld Place. The angle of reflection – by design – means that he can see where Draco is tucked up in the great grey bed, reading a book, surrounded by walls which will soon be sage green.

“Draco,” Harry says again, making him startle and look up. Harry puts down his quill. “I’ve had an idea.”

Draco doesn’t say anything; he looks at him. He looks down at his page number. “And?” he ends up with, setting the book to one side.

The gesture makes Harry grin, because it’s a gesture of affection. “I think that we should have a party,” he explains, frowning seriously to make clear that this is a most considered plan. “I’ve been slacking on this thing where I’m Hermione’s first mate. You did the ring; it’s about time that I did my bit.”

“Your _bit,_ ” Draco says, in that way of his. “Your bit includes me, I suppose?”

“Obviously,” Harry tells him flippantly, wheedling, trite. “What am I without you?”

This gets a very particular look.

“I thought that the party could be at your house…” Harry goes on.

It takes Draco about seven seconds to work it all out. He makes a face, but he doesn’t say no. “I knew that this was going to happen,” he complains, glancing at the mirror’s frame on his side, back to the glass, to Harry. He’s not talking about the party, which means that he’s talking about… “You can’t resist coming up with these little ideas of yours to save the world – and now _I’m_ involved…” His legs shift, all squirrelly.

“Not in the office, Draco,” Harry tells him firmly. He works in a _school_.

“You’re making it worse –”

“I’ll be home tomorrow to _debauch_ you,” Harry tells him, using one of Draco’s words. He’s too much marking tonight. “Think about who you want at your party,” he adds, before shutting off the connection and finishing the Gryffindors’ essays with a grin. He has a feeling that he knows what Draco’s doing.

The invitations go out two days later. They don’t call the event an engagement party, because Ron and Hermione are not to be the hosts. The party is a house warming, with the proviso that there’s not enough room in the flat where Draco and Harry actually sleep, where Harry’s moved in. But they don’t just live together in Grimmo’s third-floor flat, and Draco has a house, and that needs warming up.

It makes perfect sense, Harry decides.

The invitations say to bring suggestions for the house’s new name. Pansy’s been coming up with dozens (“My mother always said that _The Malfoys of Malfoy Manor_ was hideous.”

“Because it was,” Draco’s agreed, down quite a lot of wine. Pansy’s been around a lot.).

It feels important for Harry to give Molly and Arthur their invitation personally, at the Burrow. He explains before he hands the card over, looking down at _Draco Malfoy & Harry Potter invite you_, feeling the full weight of the ampersand.

When she sees it, Molly nods silently for a long time, as though she had an inkling, but couldn’t believe it was true.

“But are you _happy_ , Harry dear?” is what she asks in the end, as though the question has long kept her up at night, and it makes Harry’s eyes sting.

“Yeah, I think so,” he says.

Arthur pats him on the back and cuts him a slice of pumpkin bread. “It’s about time that someone did something with that house,” he says. He used to go there on raids, Harry knows.

It’s a private party, so naturally everyone in wizarding Britain hears about it from _Witch Weekly_. Harry ends up on Lee Jordan’s radio show, where he tries to answer questions sensibly. He does _not_ say that he’s with Draco for the sex, though Pansy drills him, baby Draco cuddled to her chest (“Of course I’m staying for the party. It’s important. I’m the mother of the bride.”

“ _Pansy,_ ” Draco hissed at her, while Luna sipped her drink.).

He describes Draco as pointy, despite being warned off, because it’s accurate and true. “He’s a conjurer,” Harry also comes out with, not sure why he finds this an attractive trait.

“Now, Harry, this is a question that we’ve been asked a lot…” Lee Jordan tells him where they’re sat in the studio, looking at his notes. It’s basically a sitting room, being magical radio, with all of Lee’s music posters on the wall and butterbeer for breakfast. Croissants before air. Comfy chairs. “How long have you been together?”

“Er,” Harry says, because he forgot to anticipate this question. “Well.” He resists the urge to say that it’s not anyone’s business (“You’re a public figure, Harry,” Hermione’s said. “It _matters_ what you say.”). “It was four years this summer, I s’pose,” he finally accepts.

“Not since school, then?” Lee follows up, his eyes twinkling while his tone remains even. He must know that this question is ridiculous.

“No,” confirms Harry, knowing better than to elaborate. This was one of the drills. He can't believe that people think –

He lets it go. The interview continues and Harry relaxes into his answers, most of them practised. It feels like it’s going well.

And then Harry says something entirely unplanned, because it feels like he can get away with it and in the moment it feels important to say it. “I’d marry him if I could, you know. If it was legal.” It isn’t yet, in 2008.

Lee’s eyes go wide, but his grin doesn’t fall from his face. He tosses his notes to the coffee table, and Harry can’t take it back. “Would you?” Lee asks, curious, disbelieving, encouraging.

“Yeah,” Harry tells him. He doesn’t want to take it back, he finds out. And he can only imagine Draco’s reaction, if he’s listening, but he carries on anyway. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s done and dusted… I mean, you’d have to ask him if he agrees –”

“Which would be the point of a wedding,” Lee points out, sitting back.

“Exactly,” says Harry, though it takes him a moment to work out what Lee means. They’re important, vows, Harry thinks. “You shouldn’t be surprised to hear it,” he bluffs, “because it’s not a surprise. But the laws are crap, aren’t they?” he goes on. “You didn’t know until I told you, and your listeners didn’t know, and I’ve had to embarrass us both by explaining. There could’ve been a notice stuck up on the side of a building.”

Lee nods, so Harry lets himself believe that he’s making sense.

“Like, there’s civil partnerships,” Harry explains, because this is how he feels. “But no one’s ever told me what that is and it sounds dull.” He looked it up on the Turnynet, once, sneaking Crookshanks out of the drawing-room sideboard. “As far as I can tell, it’s all the same stuff, but you don’t get the romance – and all I _want_ is the romance,” he comes out with. His dad has a gold ring, simple and happy on his finger. “What would I say, _please take this civil partnership ring?_ I know I’m very lucky, and I’m sure that some people like it, but other people do my taxes, and I don’t care what happens when we’re dead or when we separate. I care about what happens now, and what my friends remember when they put the photos on their wall.”

At this, Lee laughs high in his nose, and then he’s covering his mouth, his shoulders shaking. It’s because of the surreality of Harry talking about Draco Malfoy in the same breath as he talks about romance, Harry thinks – or something like that. He can see the joke and he can appreciate Lee laughing, but he doesn’t find it funny, feeling hot. It’s the first time that he’s said any of this out loud.

“Even if we could get it through the Wizengamot,” Harry says, because he may have thought about this, and he knows he sounds too serious, “there’s wizards and witches who want to marry muggles of the same gender, you know, and what’s there for them?” He shakes his head, his eyes catching on a Weird Sisters poster for their 99 Victory Tour. “I wouldn’t feel right skipping off into the sunset while they’re left stuck with nothing.”

There’s a smirk on Lee’s face, when Harry looks back. He’s not interrupting, even as Harry knows that he should be shutting up, warmth creeping into his cheeks. But Lee’s gesturing _OK_ with his fingers as though Harry is providing him with media gold, and that he should keep talking.

It makes Harry force himself to a conclusion. “That’s what we should’ve learned at the end of the war,” he says solidly, surprised by the depth in his voice. “There’s not one of us who’s not affected someway somehow by all these efforts to put people in boxes and shut ‘em away, whether they’re people we hate or people we love or just…” Ourselves, he wants to say. “There’s all these…” He can’t quite remember Hermione’s word. “Wizarding supremacism is only one part of it.”

“So,” Lee concludes, grinning in a way that makes him look like he could be mates with Harry’s dad. “Would I be right to put the world on notice that Harry Potter is taking up his wand?”

“Lee, I never put it down,” Harry promises, because it’s true. “I just didn’t know where to point it, for a while.”

Draco looks like ice when Harry comes home, glinting blades, his eyes stars. They’re alone. “You couldn’t resist,” is all he says, but his tone is enough of a clue.

At four o’clock in the afternoon, on the thirty-first of October, 2008, in expensive jeans, a white t-shirt and his aviator jacket – a look which Draco has recently described as _unfair_ , which is entirely the reason it’s being worn again – Harry walks up the cobbled road from Hogwarts Castle to the Three Broomsticks. His hands are in his cuddly pockets, but he frees one to wave good afternoon to Rosmerta and check again that she wouldn’t like to shut the pub and come.

“Neville’ll be there once the students are in bed,” he explains. “We’ll be going on till dawn.” Harry’s missing the Hogwarts feast, as one of the party’s hosts, but Harry’s had a lot of Hogwarts feasts in his life.

“I’m too old for all that,” says Rosmerta, flapping her hands. She’s well into her sixties, but she doesn’t look it. She grins a wicked grin, standing behind the beer taps. “You have fun,” she directs, as if she knows what that means. She doesn’t seem to mind, in the end, that Harry’s banned from drinking whiskey in her pub. “Make sure you keep bringing round that godfather of yours.” She’s been saying this every time they talk.

“He is taken, you know,” Harry points out. He’s been bringing Sirius to Hogsmeade to look at cottages, while Moony’s been spending time with Teddy (“He’s very good on that bicycle. He must get it from you. I’ve been telling him, I was always terrible at sport – and his mother could trip over gravel.”).

“Who said anything about taking?” Rosmerta suggests in the Broomsticks, as Harry pulls the pouch of floo powder from the back of his jeans. “I only want a look.”

Harry can’t argue with this. He’s seen Gary Dearborn emerge from the sea.

For the party, Harry and Draco are flying to Wiltshire, because Draco wants to sit on the back of Harry’s broom (“Yes, I am aware of how it sounds. Keep up.”). It shouldn’t take long to get things ready. Gary and Tone have been staying, and they did the logistics for the booze in two seconds. Choona the Malfoy elf is in charge of all supplies after that, and he’s happy that he knows what he’s doing.

As for decorations, they’ve told George and Angelina to turn up at six with whatever they want. Harry’s hoping that George will get everything out of his system and they can start negotiating for the wedding, because there has to be a way to make things suit Hermione’s taste.

Ron’s taste is Hermione, needless to say. Hermione and Chudley Cannons orange, which Harry thinks they can work in with the flowers.

There are going to be streamers screaming everywhere, tonight, and glitter, and George has plans to turn the drawing room’s floor and walls into something like a bouncy castle (“We’ve done it loads of times; the trick’s the safety charms, because you want to bubble your bouncers, but not so much that everyone ricochets… Angelina does the arithmancy; we’ll get it sorted.”).

Draco’s still terrified of breaking glass, Harry knows, and he’s not exactly free of the memory himself. For tonight, he wants that room to be the room where nothing breaks.

One of Harry’s jobs will be to set wards at the door, to make certain that everyone who comes is in the right mood. There’s no margin for error, given the darkness of the place. There’s a concern that no one will turn up at all, because it’s too weird or because they can’t stomach it or because they hate Draco or because they hate Harry for being with him – but Harry’s giving no thought to this. His dad’s helped him with the runes, and Sirius has suggested transfiguring ink out of fruit juice pressed from the orchard (“Ten years’ growth inside protective wards? _Yes,_ that’ll help; you need to retake your NEWT, little Harry.”

“That’s not on the –”

“Don’t bother,” Moony suggested, an illegible look in his eyes as Sirius went into a rant about the declining value of a NEWT in Transfiguration.).

On Halloween afternoon, Harry emerges from the floo in the kitchen of the third-floor flat in number 12, Grimmauld Place. The bedroom is a sage colour now, but they’ve redone the walls in the living room stone-snow white. Last weekend Harry painted the ceiling a soft, near-beige peach-yellow-orange, to play off the blue of the sofa and the brown of the antiquarian maps, framed and stuck on the walls – the colours of his painting over the sofa and the creamy tones of Draco’s ash furniture, the southern light which floods through the windows on sunny days. He’s terribly fond of the effect.

Waiting for him, Draco is slouched against the wall just inside the door, his arms crossed behind him. He’s wearing black robes and he’s unreadable, but Harry doesn’t care. The robes will be gone in the morning, when Harry’s taken him to bed, and he always makes sense in the end.

“Hello,” he greets Harry now, crossing the floor. “Have you been practising your speech?” His tone is cool and detached and he’s a bundle of nerves. He’s refused to give a speech; he’s told Harry that he’s obliged.

“Thought I’d wing it,” says Harry anyway, shrugging, catching the front of him and kissing him hello. “What’s there to say?” he tells Draco’s faceted eyes, his pointy nose, his mouth. “ _Thanks for coming; I love Draco Malfoy; let’s thank the elves; try not to drown in the swimming pool._ ”

“There has never been a swimming pool –” says Draco, not getting the hint before Harry kisses him again, elbow round his neck, because it’s been several days.

He’s planning to say a bit more than this, in reality. There’s something brewing in his head about olive trees, but he wants to make a joke about Draco driving a car, and the roots of vines go very deep, and he’ll come up with something, he’s sure, when it’s time.

“Ready to go?” Harry asks.

“If you insist,” Draco doesn’t say no.

They fly to Wiltshire on a fair wind, where Draco points out the village of Oddlesford. It looks sleepy and innocuous from the air. The manor does too. The estate’s extensive grounds have been well maintained by the elves, it turns out, even as a squat, and Harry sees the orchard, the formal and and more cottage-like gardens, the ornamental maze with no cup at its centre. The elves are waiting on the driveway to greet them, dots of Malfoy white, and Harry’s breath seizes in his chest.

“Yes, I’ve changed my mind,” agrees Draco, tightening his arms around Harry, the side of his face pressed to the collar of Harry’s jacket, his hair. His eyes will be shut, Harry thinks. “Let’s go home. Fly me home.”

Harry imagines it. He lets himself imagine it. Nothing will change, and Ron and Hermione will get married just as happily somewhere else. His mum and dad will find another place to live.

But when he thinks about the forest, these days, Harry doesn’t remember feeling love. He remembers feeling the strength of those who loved him, his parents and Sirius and Moony. And Ginny most of all, who won him for a few weeks through sheer bloody-mindedness – which was good going, Harry thinks, because all evidence suggests that he is more gay than bi. A bit repressed, at least. Difficult, when it comes to all that.

It doesn’t matter. The point is, Harry thinks, they need more than love to banish darkness from this world. They need sheer bloody-mindedness, conviction and commitment. The willingness to put on this party. Innocence, of a kind.

He looks down at the village and the manor house, and it’s all the same place, the buildings and the land. It looks like a map from up here, and Harry knows how to read maps. He thinks he knows the way.

“Come on,” Harry tells Draco over his shoulder, shoring him up. “It’s going to be fun.”

“How is it going to be fun?” Draco asks, his voice deep and reluctant.

“Well, there’s this first bit,” Harry suggests, dipping the broom slightly, just enough to make his stomach flip, and he hopes Draco’s too.

Draco tightens his grip, not complaining, which Harry takes as the instruction to go.

Turning a quick spiral higher, Harry swoops to dive eight-hundred feet like an arrow, pulling up at the end so close to the ground that the turn feels like the latch of a portkey, one which doesn’t kill them. He lets the force free in a sweeping corkscrew, over and around in a loop to end cleanly in front of the house, its threshold steps, the rosewood broom humming with joy.

“How do you _do_ that?” Draco asks as they’re dismounting, flushed pink, entirely breathless and alight in the fading October sun, all else forgotten as their eyes meet.

Harry takes hold of his hand, because there’s no need to answer. He presses the back of it to his mouth, their fingers laced together, and Draco goes pinker.

The manor’s darkness is pregnant, foreboding. The elves are silent, watching them. But the evening won’t be quiet for long and it’s only a house, in the end, even on All Hallows' Eve. Harry’s fingers are tingling.

“Welcome home, Master Draco,” says Topsy the elf, coming down from the top of the steps. She should be working for a hedge fund, Harry’s been told, but she says that she likes it here. Her eyes are like a bottomless well of rainwater, her ears long and slender. She’ll have survived all manner of hell, Harry thinks. “Where would Master like to see?”

“I…” Draco looks at her, at the house, and he’s choking, freezing up.

He could have come here with Luna, Harry knows, but he didn’t. He came here with Harry. It’s time he earned his keep.

Doing what Luna can’t, Harry tucks his mouth to Draco’s ear. “Your old bedroom,” he suggests in a whisper. “Where you used to dream of me.” He’s squeezing his hand as a hint. “We’ve got ages…” 

“You are _horrendous,_ ” Draco whispers back, flustered, flushed from the dive. But then he’s telling Topsy, raising his chin, “It’s all right. I know the way.”

And he does, straight-backed and purposeful. Harry follows, and he doesn’t take his eyes off him for the rest of the night. Draco never falters once.

It’s a great night, in the end. It’s really very great: the house is full of people they love, and there’s cake. Draco’s parents redecorated after the war, so nothing in the house looks familiar; there’s simply the feeling of restlessness, dark. An itch on Harry’s forehead. As evening turns into morning, Harry’s sure that he can feel the dark fading, the skittering cold of it warming from the back of his neck and his arms.

It’s Draco who falls asleep first, in the end, cuddling up with his head on Harry’s leg, exhausted, snug under Harry’s jacket as the sky turns pink and gold. They’re outside on the lawn where there’s been croquet, where Harry’s mum’s been shouting “ _Four!_ ” and breaking into cackles, because it’s the most pointless game in the world.

Harry’s less drunk than he expected to be, though everything’s fuzzy and warm. Everything feels light, and he’s enjoyed the bouncy room a lot (“Potter, stop bouncing at me –”

“Why? Oh look, it’s Percy. Let’s bounce at Percy. Charlie! Bounce at Percy.”

“Audrey, help! I’m being –”

“No you’re not. You’re being sought. Excellent idea, Harry, well done. Seekers, on my count –”

“Audrey!”

“Ready or not, Perce…”

“Charlie Weasley –!”).

“Aha!” comes Hermione’s voice behind Harry, now, and she’s entirely sober, though it’s not easy to tell. “I’VE FOUND HIM,” she shouts back to the house, coming down to sit by his side on the lawn, six months round. “We were wondering where you’d gone.”

“Shh,” Harry tells her, nodding to Draco, who’s twitching his nose like a rabbit while Harry strokes his hair.

“Honestly, Harry,” she says, her eyes brown, their colour visible, like the grass and like the sky with the morning. “ _Are_ you a wizard?”

With a flick of her wand, she conjures Draco half of a set of earmuffs, to cover up the ear he’s exposed. The muff is bright pink.

Harry changes the colour to black, giving his best friend a look. He can be nice.

Hermione looks unrepentant, shrugging into her hair.

Everyone comes out in the end. Ron sits with Hermione, lolling an arm around her shoulders and twirling his fingers into curls, more relaxed than usual – “All right, mate?”

“Yeah, all right,” Harry agrees, and they grin at each other.

“ _Boys_ ,” says Hermione, squawking as Ron kisses her hard on the side of her face. She tuts, turning pink.

Neville and Luna and Liz are out in the gardens somewhere, looking at Narcissa’s old plants with Gary (“It’s like Frank and Al had a baby,” Gary said on seeing Neville, sounding amazed.

The nicest bloke in the world, Neville made this ridiculous statement a joke. “It’s funny, in’t it?” he said. “We all know that it was Harry’s dad.”).

Ginny and Matías have been in newly-wedded bliss, caught up in corners, but they come out behind Ron, and Ginny scuffs Harry on the head.

“You look so happy, Haz,” she accuses. “You should’ve done this years ago.”

Harry looks up at her. Her brown eyes are dancing, and she’s grinning, holding her husband’s hand. Harry finds himself laughing, because he’s never read Ginny very well.

“It’s been so great to meet your guy,” says Matías, nodding at Draco with his head on Harry’s leg. “He’s got a great house,” he says, and he _cannot_ be sober. “This is a great party,” he gushes. “That was a great speech – I loved what you said about the way all roots matter, because of the _fruit_ … You’re so articulate; it really got to me, everything you said at the wedding; it was beautiful…”

“OK,” Harry agrees, suddenly seeing the attraction of someone with no memories of the war at all. Especially someone so nice. And so fit.

He glances at Ginny, who shrugs, almost sheepish. With a leaf from his mum’s book, Harry winks.

His mum and dad even appear then. They’ve been busy for most of the night, shaking hands and getting to know each single person who’s come through the door, telling stories. It’s looked exhausting, to Harry, but they both look like they could go for another hundred years, chatting with each other as though they think that each other’s the best. His mum’s bubbling with laughter and hitting Harry’s dad on the chest. He’s grinning like the sun, arm loose around her shoulders.

Sirius has been going round with them in a team of three, when they’ve not been split up, while Moony’s been sitting and chatting with Gary, Bill and Fleur, before Bill and Fleur went home. Meanwhile, Tone has been chatting up Angelina and George, all the house elves – the Malfoy family portraits, to their shame – investigating everything and making Draco fuss that there’ll be some sort of muggle trap to kill him, but there hasn’t been.

In the promising light of the morning, Sirius is telling Tone and Moony a story, but he can’t seem to work out their pace, falling behind and catching up and going too quickly, and he looks so much like a dog that Harry thinks someone should tell him.

Half of school was here and some of them still are, drifting out into the garden (“Clocked it in sixth year,” said Padma Patil smugly about Harry and Draco.

“No you didn’t,” scoffed Parvati Boot, making Terry laugh – apparently everyone tries to pronounce it _Boh-ot_ , or something, when it's Parvati. She has to explain that it's the same word as follows Wellington.

“D’you remember when we thought that Nev was the gay one?” Seamus asked Dean.

“Yeah,” Dean replied, before looking round the group. “It was about the same time that Sea was getting his first snog off a certain Miss Parkinson…”

Laughter. “The _Gryffindors_ , Pansy?” Draco exclaimed unironically, holding Harry’s hand.

“It was after the Yule Ball,” answered Pansy archly, unashamed, baby-free until midnight, when she was due home. She addressed the group too. “In case anyone has failed to realise, my date was very, very gay. For _Harry Potter_. I was starved of attention.”

“I was –” Draco went pink.

“He was more into Viktor Krum at that point,” Harry defended, sort of, squeezing his hand and earning a harder squeeze back, vindictive. He repented, “I might’ve been into Cedric…”

“Weren’t we all?” asked a pregnant Susan Bones, while Hannah Abbott nodded seriously.

“I also might’ve wanted him to be my dad.”

Seamus guffawed, but Dean shook his head, clicking his fingers and pointing. “I’ve been there!” he agreed.

“Oh yeah, your _crisis_ ,” Seamus came out with.

“You poor thing,” said Padma seriously, patting Draco on the shoulder.

“At least with this wreck you won’t have to worry about Mimi the Man Stealer,” offered Parvati, using a name that was _definitely_ going in Harry’s speech at the wedding. They all turned to look at where Ron and Hermione were lost neatly in the corner, hanging off each other’s elbows. “Lav saw him first,” Parvati pointed out, arch and Gryffindor, to a definite snigger from Draco.).

Katie Bell is still here in the morning, with George and Angelina and that lot. Harry’s long apologised (“Pfft; work is work. You’re all as bad as each other, family witnesses. I don’t care about your domestics…”). She’s been putting Moony off all night by referring to things that he thought no one knew (“That pub you used to go to in Vauxhall’s shut down. Bit of a shame. Everyone round there says it was good.”).

But it’s Justin Finch-Fletchley, with remarkable stamina, who points out the obvious. “Isn’t this when we take the survivors’ photo?”

Harry looks up at the bright orange dawn, and he thinks that he knows exactly what Justin means.

“Yes!” declares Tone, pointing at him, and for some reason he takes charge.

It’s because he’s a DJ, Harry thinks, not moving from Hermione’s warmth and the weight of Draco’s head, even as everyone else moves around them. Tone must be used to managing crowds at the end of the night. Or maybe it’s just him – his herding instinct to pick strays out of gutters and put them in taxis, take them home if they’ve got nowhere to stay.

He’s quite a lot like Sirius, really. Moony must have been so lost, before he found someone to herd him again.

“Where are the elves?” Tone’s asking everyone, arms stretched wide. “I want the elves!” They immediately start popping in as though he’s conjured them, making him laugh, though Topsy never looks amused.

“Oh, are we taking a photo?” and that’s Luna back with her gang. “What a lovely idea. Hello Harry.”

She’s smiling, her eyes summer-sky blue. Harry waves at her. She and Draco went down to the cellar with Ollivander, before the rest of the party arrived (“Well, that’s that,” Luna said to Liz when they came out. She turned to Draco and Harry. “When are you changing the name?”).

“Is anyone still inside?” Tone’s directing them. “We need everyone.”

“It’s like a child on the first day of Hogwarts,” Gary observes, while Moony and Sirius agree. None of them is moving to help.

“I’ll go and check,” suggests Alicia, by the house, more sensible than Harry remembers. One of the elves is recounting a list.

There’s a great deal of moving around. Sirius ruffles Harry’s hair, insisting on kneeling behind him, calling out something sarcastic to who knows who. Harry’s mum and dad kneel there too, and his mum wraps an arm around his neck to give him a squeeze. She and Harry’s dad have been looking like they’ve got a secret, all this past week, but Harry’s waiting for them to reveal it.

One of the last figures to emerge from the house is Dudley Dursley (“Hullo Harry.”

“Er – what? I mean, yeah, hello Dudley,” Harry said when he appeared, fairly early on with his hair combed and parted, holding a beer. “What are you…? I, er, didn’t realise you were –”

Draco intervened at this moment, reaching out to shake Dudley’s meaty hand. “Draco Malfoy,” he said, sharp and charming. “I sent the invitation; delighted you could make it.”

And Dudley’s always been in touch with Luna, so Harry supposes that he should have seen this coming.

“Yeah, thanks; it’s great,” Dudley said, nodding around at all the witches and wizards. “I like the streamers.”

A few came screaming like fireworks over their heads at this moment, depositing flowers and glitter and glowing dots of light.

They made Dudley grin and Harry had an odd feeling in his chest, like something relaxing. “Harry saved my life, once,” Dudley told Draco as though he was sizing him up, knocking back a swallow of beer.

“He’s saved my life twice, thrice, a dozen times,” Draco succinctly replied, narrowing his eyes and looking Dudley up and down. “It’s not a competition,” he added as though he meant the opposite.

“It’s good of you to come,” Harry said awfully, but Dudley seemed happy nonetheless.

“Yeah, I heard that your dad beat up mine.” He didn’t seem aggrieved by this. “Proper left cross.” He mimed it, and Harry could only nod.

Tickled by the awkwardness of this encounter, clearly, Draco laughed. His grin was full, and the sound was something unguarded that Harry hadn’t heard since school. It made him fall with a _whoosh_.).

No one expected Dudley to stick around long, but Harry’s been spotting him with Cho Chang all night, and they both look flushed as they emerge with Alicia. It’s only the booze, Harry imagines, but he wonders whether Dudley’s thought about what Uncle Vernon would say – or whether, in the end, Dudley doesn’t care and never did.

“Right,” Tone demands from the crowd of them, as Alicia gives the thumbs-up. “How does this work without a tripod?”

“Oh, it’s fucking nonsense,” Moony declares, much too loudly, for him. He sounds exactly like Sirius. It’s weird. He must have had enough to drink to let down his guard. “You set up a mirror and the charm bounces off. Like something out of ancient Egypt.”

Draco wakes up now, with a start, his eyes catching Harry’s as though he’s confused. He pulls the earmuff from his head and sits up on the grass.

Behind them, Harry’s dad is scoffing. “Do shut up, Moony,” he’s commanding, amused. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

“You love ancient Egypt,” says Sirius, agreeing, sounding more like Harry’s dad than himself. “Don’t pretend to be cool.”

The irony of this statement makes Harry’s mum mutter something sarcastic about cucumbers; his dad erupts in a guffaw.

On the other side of Harry, Ron’s mumbling something drunkenly to Hermione, and it’s making her giggle.

“What the fuck is going on?” Draco whispers to Harry, looking around them, at the sun. It was dark when they first came outside.

Wand aimed purposefully over their heads to somewhere further down the croquet lawn, Harry’s dad conjures a mirror, six feet tall and ten feet wide.

Now he’s sat up, Harry’s jacket is lying over Draco’s knees. Harry tucks his hand underneath it to squeeze his leg and make him twitch. “We’re surviving,” he whispers, and pops him a kiss on the jaw.

“Is everyone paying attention?” demands Harry’s dad, bopping Harry on the head with his wand. He feels it with a jolt, his dad’s magic, the rooted strength of its mahogany and the stubborn fight of its dragon core, the heartstring of a Hebridean Black.

Turning his head to face forward, Harry means to pull a grin, but looking into the light, he feels his mouth closing and he’s blinking, eyes wide.

He looks young. He’s sure he looks young. He’s sure that he looks eleven years old.

Because he’s sitting on this grass with these people, the sun rising into hazy sky to cast light on this manor house. Harry sees his face, he sees a crowd around and behind him, his Draco on his left and Ron and Hermione on his right, four people not ghosts acting up behind his head.

He’s looking into a mirror, Harry thinks, and he isn’t invisible. He’s looking into a mirror, and everyone can see him, exactly as he is. They can see what he’s seeing too, and most likely they can see that it’s his deepest desire. He’s young, he’s full of innocence, and he’s surrounded by family.

“Cheese,” says Hermione emphatically, and she pats him on the knee.

“Erised,” says Harry, holding Draco’s leg and turning to catch his mouth and kiss him. He makes a sound of complaint, because he wasn’t ready, but it doesn’t stop him kissing back. “That’s the name of this place.” Harry repeats it.

There’s a grin on Harry’s face and excitement in his chest, because it’s the place where his parents live. It’s the place where Draco’s always lived, really. It’s imagination made real.

“Erised.” Draco lets it sound in his voice, deep and posh, like something from a period drama, and he nods, not saying no. “It’s a start,” he agrees, and the charm flashes bright.

.

THE END.


End file.
